My quick rating – 5.3/10. Lockbox starts with a van driving down the road, which normally suggests a road trip, a kidnapping, or at least several people becoming part of the body count. Here, it’s just one guy being held captive in the back, screaming, “I don’t wanna see the boy.” Meanwhile, director Daniel Stamm alternates between showing a child in a wheelchair sitting in what appears to be a hospital. Of course, I have to ask myself just who this kid is and why everybody’s afraid of him.
After the title card, Carla Gugino‘s Ellen tells us she’s going to share her story so this doesn’t happen again. Famous last words in a horror movie.
Ellen was a caretaker who eventually couldn’t keep doing it after her parents died, so she decided to reinvent herself. Then a relative calls and asks her to take in her cousin Winthrop, played by Lou Taylor Pucci. And because horror movies apparently consider “taking in the mysterious relative” a perfectly reasonable career move. Ellen agrees.
Enter Katharine Isabelle as Vahna, Ellen’s strange neighbor who immediately feels like someone you should probably keep an eye on. I have been a fan of Isabelle since American Mary, so naturally I’m paying attention whenever she shows up. Vahna clearly has some ulterior motives, and Isabelle absolutely owns every scene she’s in.
Remember that boy? Yeah, he is damn creepy. The movie does a good job of making you question what exactly is going on, particularly once the ritual starts and things get more supernatural. Whatever that creature becomes during the ritual toward the end may have been digital, but it looked pretty damn cool. There’s also an arm injury involving skin being ripped apart that looks about as pleasant as it sounds.
Eventually, we learn that the lockbox isn’t just some mysterious object. It’s essentially a human demon trap. The film seems to be a murder mystery, and initially, that is indeed what I believed I was viewing. Then the weirdness starts piling up. Everyone behaves like something is slightly off, clues don’t quite fit together, and the atmosphere keeps making you believe something really bad is happening.
That’s where Lockbox works best. The movie creates actual dread, without having to throw shit at us all the time. The sensation is there that even if the story doesn’t explain what’s going on, there is something waiting out there beyond the frame.
Unfortunately, the explanation for the demon itself is where things get frustrating. The script keeps its cards very close to its chest, but eventually you realize it’s holding back more than it’s actually telling you. We never get a particularly satisfying explanation of where this entity came from, why it specifically wants Winthrop, or what the ancient rules governing this thing actually are. We’re basically told it has terrifying powers and should be taken very seriously. Okay, got it. Terrifying demon. Very bad. Please continue.
The performances help enormously. Gugino once again proves she can make nearly anything watchable, while Isabelle is fantastic and more or less hijacks the movie whenever she appears. Even when the story gets a little too vague, the two of them give it enough personality to keep things moving.
Lockbox is well made, unsettling in places, and has a few genuinely creepy ideas. It just never feels like it’s doing anything particularly new with the genre. The mystery and atmosphere kept me interested, but the demon mythology needed more meat on the bone.
Still, I’ll happily watch Carla Gugino and Katharine Isabelle make supernatural situations considerably more interesting than they probably have any right to be. That’s worth something.
