It seems that despite having only two feature films under his belt, Zach Cregger is the current hot director of horror. This one won critical claim, has an A-list cast, and most importantly made a lot of money. It admittedly gets all of the basics: good filmmaking techniques, multiple perspectives to hint at a larger mystery and shows restraint in its use of supernatural elements. Unfortunately you strip away the layers, the core is revealed to be empty and utterly uninteresting. Once you understand what is happening, none of it is remotely plausible and the whole thing falls flat for me.

One day in the town of Maybrook, teacher Justine Grady walks into her classroom to find only one student there Alex Lilly. The authorities discover that at 2:17 AM that morning, the seventeen other children in the class rose from their beds and ran out of their houses. Police investigations uncover nothing and Justine is placed on leave as the parents are suspicious of her and demand answers. She resorts to drinking and wants to speak to Alex against the principal’s instructions. Meanwhile Archer is the father of one of the missing children. Frustrated by police inaction, he takes to following Justine and vandalizes her car by painting WITCH on it. Justine follows Alex home from school and discovers that all of the windows of his house have been covered by newspapers. She sneaks in to the back and peering through a gap sees his parents sitting motionless in the dark. She tries telling Marcus the principal what she saw but is disbelieved.

You can immediately tell that Cregger is pretty good at this horror thing. Little details like 2:17 AM being the precise time that the children get up from their beds, the arms-outstretched Naruto-style posture that the affected adopt while they are running, that there are 17 children missing and so on are all good hooks to get you into the film. Justine’s problems seem relatable and it feels like there could be some mundane explanation for the mystery. Archer’s dream sequence of seeing a giant automatic rifle above a house takes this into weird territory but adds to the intrigue. Yet when all is revealed, it’s the most boring explanation ever and all the rest of it turns out to be just smoke and mirrors to conceal how uncreative the central idea of the film is. Characters like Justine’s ex-boyfriend Paul and James the homeless drug addict are human interest side stories to flesh out Justine. But for the purposes of the main plot itself are irrelevant red herrings. So Cregger does a fine job of setting everything up, but it’s all flash and no substance as there is no originality at its heart and the director has nothing to say.

Among the many implausibilities on display here is not only the utter incompetence of law enforcement in solving the case but the seeming lack of urgency and attention from everyone else. The film opens with a voiceover about how the people of the town prefer to forget that this incident ever happened. This is hogwash. In real life, 17 children going missing in suburban America would be global news. The town would be flooded with reporters from all over the world, never mind law enforcement. Cregger does try to make some excuses about how the villain is smart enough to foil investigators. But again, this is implausible. The police aren’t going to do a cursory search of the house and leave well alone. They are going to do multiple searches. There will be constant surveillance in the streets. They will go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and do DNA swabs. The scenario as shown here is not only impossible, it’s also incredibly dumb to pull off if you really had such power. You could have picked up 17 homeless persons in any major city and no one would notice or care. The issue of course is that the audience wouldn’t care either and you would have no movie.

Some fans might enjoy the setup enough that they don’t care too much about what lies underneath. They might even dismiss my criticism as being not in the spirit of the horror genre. That’s probably fair as I need even horror movies to have some actual worldbuilding as well to be able to believe in what is happening. Watching this, I was thinking the only way this could possibly make sense if this were some kind of secret government program or something, and so Archer’s dream of seeing the assault rifle would actually be relevant. In the end, the explanation is the most traditional and stupid one, making me lose all respect for this film.