The Reel Review
Four women (including Grammy winning alternative musician St. Vincent) direct this 2017 anthology of short horror stories. The Box is the tale of a young boy who mysteriously stops eating after peering inside a stranger’s gift box on the subway. The Birthday Party is the story of a neurotic woman’s attempt to keep her husband’s sudden death from ruining her young daughter’s birthday party. Don’t Fall is the story of campers terrorized by a creature in the desert wilderness, while Her Only Living Son is about a woman trying to protect her teenage son, who is the spawn of Satan.
As is often the case with these anthologies, one (Don’t Fall, directed by Roxanne Benjamin) was pretty good, one (The Birthday Party, directed by Annie Clark aka St. Vincent) was painfully terrible and the other two (The Box, directed by Jovanka Vuckovic and Her Only Living Son directed by Karyn Kusama) VERY mediocre. All four suffer from an unsatisfying lack of character development and gaping plot holes. You know you are in trouble when the best part of the anthology is not any one film, but rather, the cool, creepy stop-animation moving doll house that ties the stories together.
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