Well, I wasn’t GOING to review this movie because, as I stated in my THE WOODSMAN review I have no interest in slagging the hard work of someone, but, well, I can review the movie without slagging it so, here goes.
Fingers crossed.
THE THING INSIDE US is the story of a married couple trying to discover what has been making the wife get up every night to sleepwalk. The husband, hoping to get some answers that the doctor isn’t offering, chooses install cameras everywhere he can think and begins filming everything and then uploading any ‘interesting’ footage to the internet to see if people have any experience with what they are going through. The footage shows that the wife gets up every night and heads to the same place, just outside their door and at the edge of their back yard where she stands for hours on end until she wakes at dawn. Things begin to get even stranger when, after the husband wakes her one morning, she moves to a further spot and he follows her out there. While standing in the dark with her hands out, and palms up, she emits a strange sound. He tries to get her to stop and is warned by a voice not her own to stop messing around. The husband is deeply concerned but gets a message from a stranger that tells him they have gone through something similar and that he must be careful. He starts to email back and forth with this person but the mystery only deepens the more he learns. He gets desperate enough to lock the house with padlocks so she cannot get out but somehow she finds the key and still gets outside. The husband is at his wits end and getting scared at the changes he’s seeing in his wife but just as he thinks things cannot get worse, they do, and a scary situation turns dangerous and horrifying and he may wish he’d never installed the cameras at all.
The idea behid this movie is actually super solid – the idea of trying to figure why someone sleepwalks and is doing the things this wife does is a good start. It’s a creepy start. The problem is that there isn’t any work put into MAKING this scary. It’s very 1-2-3, 1-2-3 and by the numbers, as if they are ticking off things on a checklist. This is a movie where the less shown the better but they feel driven to show things they shouldn’t and thus ruin any tension they’ve built. I said this in the other review but this is not unlike the film HONEYMOON, but that works because the acting is spot on (the acting is fine in THE THING, but I am just saying…) and the tension is built slowly and paid off with dialogue and a chilling finale. Here, the end is the goal, not the journey, and the end isn’t satisfying in the least. The core characters are fine but the further into the cast you get the less there is to work with and the story gets stretched far too thin. There is a nod to the pandemic with some television news moments in the film but they don’t quite hit the right tone.
This movie really wants to be a creepy and weird movie but it comes off as so corny and cheesy in the third act that you just hope you can get your eyes back to seeing straight after they have rolled so hard during the film. The biggest problem is the use of low rent CGI to flesh things out when they just make it all look absolutely dollar store dumpy.
I can appreciate how much goes into making a movie and applaud everyone for doing what they did and hope they lived their dreams. I just wish this was a better film and more memorable entry into the found footage annals and not another throw away.
1.5 out of 5
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