It has to be very difficult to care for a shut-in, especially when you're doing it by yourself, and even more so when you live in the middle of nowhere. You have very little support (physically or emotionally), which means you're probably very lonely, overworked, frustrated, you can't easily go out much and you don't have much of a life to call your own. Even if you love the person you're taking care of (as most, if not all caregivers do), it has to be extremely tough. That's the set-up for "Shut In" (PG-13, 1:31).
Oscar nominee Naomi Watts stars as Mary Portman, a family psychologist who's unable to help Stephen (Charlie Heaton), her troubled teenage stepson, get past his (unexplained) inner turmoil. When Stephen gets expelled from school (for reasons also not explained), Mary and her husband make the very difficult but necessary decision to send him off to a special boarding school. On the way to that school, a car accident kills Stephen's father and leaves Stephen in a catatonic state, with Mary as his sole caregiver.
Mary loves her stepson and does her best with him, but she also has to keep working. After feeding, bathing and dressing Stephen each morning, she sets him up in front of the television and walks over to her office in a small building right next to her house in rural Maine. One of her patients is a young orphan named Tom (Jacob Tremblay), who is nearly deaf and doesn't speak. When Tom finds out that his caregiver is planning to send him to Boston, he runs away and shows up back at Mary's house.
Before Mary can get Tom's caregiver to come out to her place and pick him up, Tom disappears. As that cold Maine winter day turns into an even colder night, Mary and those helping to search for Tom fear the worst. Mary starts "seeing" Tom in her bedroom at night and actually starts thinking that he has died and his ghost is haunting her. Mary has a psychiatrist (Oliver Platt) who tries to reason with her and offers to prescribe sleep medication, until he learns there's something about Mary that he didn't know.
"Shut In" is an entertaining thriller if you can look past the many plot holes in Christina Hodson's script and inconsistencies in Farren Blackburn's directing. There are numerous basic questions left unanswered (like those examples mentioned above and others like why, in the midst of a winter storm, there's no ice on Mary's pond) and some characters' actions don't make sense in light of their motivations. The twists are cool, but the acting is shaky and the plot is simplistic and contrived. "C+"
Oscar nominee Naomi Watts stars as Mary Portman, a family psychologist who's unable to help Stephen (Charlie Heaton), her troubled teenage stepson, get past his (unexplained) inner turmoil. When Stephen gets expelled from school (for reasons also not explained), Mary and her husband make the very difficult but necessary decision to send him off to a special boarding school. On the way to that school, a car accident kills Stephen's father and leaves Stephen in a catatonic state, with Mary as his sole caregiver.
Mary loves her stepson and does her best with him, but she also has to keep working. After feeding, bathing and dressing Stephen each morning, she sets him up in front of the television and walks over to her office in a small building right next to her house in rural Maine. One of her patients is a young orphan named Tom (Jacob Tremblay), who is nearly deaf and doesn't speak. When Tom finds out that his caregiver is planning to send him to Boston, he runs away and shows up back at Mary's house.
Before Mary can get Tom's caregiver to come out to her place and pick him up, Tom disappears. As that cold Maine winter day turns into an even colder night, Mary and those helping to search for Tom fear the worst. Mary starts "seeing" Tom in her bedroom at night and actually starts thinking that he has died and his ghost is haunting her. Mary has a psychiatrist (Oliver Platt) who tries to reason with her and offers to prescribe sleep medication, until he learns there's something about Mary that he didn't know.
"Shut In" is an entertaining thriller if you can look past the many plot holes in Christina Hodson's script and inconsistencies in Farren Blackburn's directing. There are numerous basic questions left unanswered (like those examples mentioned above and others like why, in the midst of a winter storm, there's no ice on Mary's pond) and some characters' actions don't make sense in light of their motivations. The twists are cool, but the acting is shaky and the plot is simplistic and contrived. "C+"