Directed by Samuel Bodin
Written by Chris Thomas Devlin
Starring:
- Lizzy Caplan as Carol
- Antony Starr as Mark
- Cleopatra Coleman as Miss Devine
- Woody Norman as Peter
- Luke Busey as Brian
Rating: 
What initially presents itself in Cobweb as a story of spectral intrusion is ultimately a façade—a deliberate obfuscation masking a deeper, more perverse narrative construction. The film flirts with traditional supernatural horror, only to peel back that narrative layer and reveal a monstrous fairy tale about repression, deception, and inherited violence.
Samuel Bodin’s direction is calculated in its disorientation. The film lulls the viewer with slow-burn domestic unease before succumbing to a camp aesthetic that violently erupts in the final act. This abrupt tonal shift is jarring but essential: it reframes the film not as a conventional horror piece, but as a study in genre mutation—how horror tropes can be overextended into the realm of grotesque spectacle.
Peter, played with understated vulnerability by Woody Norman, exists in a liminal space—isolated both socially and emotionally. The walls of his house literally and figuratively close in around him, haunted not only by whispers, but by the weight of unspoken trauma. Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan perform with eerie detachment, embodying parental archetypes twisted into uncanny caricature. Their performances toe the line between parody and menace, enhancing the film’s destabilizing tone.
There’s no denying the narrative is built from familiar parts—bullied child, eerie home, hidden voices, mysterious past. But what makes Cobweb compelling is its embrace of horror’s “low” forms: camp, schlock, pulp. Rather than attempt to transcend these elements, Bodin pushes them to their extreme, treating horror not as a vehicle for psychological realism but as a playground for aesthetic experimentation.
The film recalls the era of Euro-horror and exploitation thrillers, where garish design and outrageous plotting were not limitations but modes of expression. Cobweb shares that sensibility. It uses horror’s clichés not to disguise its lack of originality but to engage with them as tools of stylized excess. The result is uneven, yes, but also bold in its grotesquery.
Viewed in our current cinematic moment—often dominated by self-serious “elevated horror”—Cobweb feels refreshingly impure. It’s not afraid of bad taste. It doesn’t apologize for its tonal dissonance or narrative leaps. It offers instead a grisly spectacle that is, at its core, a dark fable wrapped in baroque absurdity. Imperfect, yet oddly invigorating.
