★★★★☆
Jessica Rothe loses a child and goes down a rabbit-hole in Caleb Phillips’s slippery grief-mystery.
Caleb Phillips opens on a nightmare every parent will flinch at – a baby vanishing from its cot – and then declines to let you find your footing for the rest of the running time. Marie (Jessica Rothe) and Paul (Charlie Barnett) are the couple undone by the disappearance, but when a stranger turns up offering a route to getting their son back, the film tilts from domestic anguish into something stranger and more conceptual.
To say much more would spoil the pleasures of a plot that keeps reconfiguring under you, but anyone who has followed Rothe since Happy Death Day will recognise the territory: she is drawn to script premises that fold reality back on itself, and she gives Marie a raw, fraying commitment that holds the weirdness together. Meanwhile Phillips has a clean, unshowy way with the uncanny, letting the wrongness creep in at the edges rather than announcing it full blast.
True, the big reveals will likely be guessable to viewers steeped in the kinds of films Rothe tends to sign, and the ending is dragged a touch past its natural stopping point. But as a piece of liminal, grief-fuelled mystery it’s confidently made and enjoyably unnerving. This is one for audiences who like their horror playfully dark and cosmic.
Imposters played at Tubi FrightFest in London.