★★★☆☆
A grieving author wakes to find her dead physicist husband making pancakes – and reality starts to come apart.
Andy Chen’s feature debut, after the body-horror short The Spider, plants itself at the intersection of grief and hard science. Joey (India de Beaufort), an author hollowed out by the death of her brilliant physicist husband Ben (Bob Morley, of The 100), wakes one morning to find him at the stove making breakfast as if nothing had happened – and from there her grip on what’s real begins to fray.
Chen, who also shoots, cites Shyamalan, Nolan and Villeneuve as lodestars, and while the budget is a fraction of theirs, he shares their taste for the slow conceptual unpicking of a reality that won’t sit still. You suspect fairly early that someone is using physics to mess with Joey’s head, or the world, or both, but the pleasure is in the not-knowing: Chen keeps you guessing at what is actually happening, and at the identity of the mysterious figure glimpsed prowling outside the house.
De Beaufort anchors it with a raw, fraying commitment, and there’s genre ballast in support from Doug Jones and Heather Langenkamp. It’s compellingly built and decently paced, a sci-fi mystery-horror that trusts mood over exposition. The one drawback is a certain predictability – seasoned viewers will be a step ahead of a couple of the turns. But as an emotional, atmospheric calling card it marks Chen as a name worth watching. This is one for anyone who likes their horror to keep pulling the rug.
Another played at Tubi FrightFest in London.