'There's Something Wrong with the Children' (2023) Movie Review: Another Blumhouse Horror Movie

There’s Something Wrong with the Children is a horror film by Blumhouse directed by Roxanne Benjamin starring Zach Gilford, Amanda Crew and Alisha Wainwright.

A B-Series movie of the “friends in a log cabin” type with terrifying children… but with no corn.

Storyline

After Margaret and Ben take off on a week-end escapade with their lifelong friends, Ellie and Thomas and their two small children, something supernatural starts happening when Ellie and Thomas´s kids start behaving strangely after they disappear in the woods at night, which makes Ben suspect something weird is happening.

Movie Review

This is a movie divided into two parts, which starts slowly and which it is hard to enter in spite of its great start (those fluorescent credits and good camera movement). Then, it relaxes, offers us a presentation of the characters which is rather unsubstantial (daddies and moms a little fed-up with life) and later drops us into terror… with a funny touch.

Technically a well-made movie in everything except the photography and sound track, it has a pretty decent screenplay, with interesting dialogues and the situations are well planned… sequence by sequence. Roxanne Benjamin knows how to direct each scene and bring something special to them although this is a low budget firlm (a Blumhouse product, we aren´t going to find anything new in this). Good camera use, which knows how to move in order to create necessary tension and introduce us into the horror. The plot… takes a while to start and take us to the true essence of the film, premeditatively breaking the rhythm of the film half way through and intentionally breaking it and leading us to something that is much more interesting.

This movie isn´t going to change your life and does not pretend to do so: it wants to be a good horror film that is unpretentious and deliberately uses the “genre” elements, it knows how to handle the terrain it covers.

Little more than that. A movie that does not aspire in its budget or its screenplay to offer a “little extra” something that it probably needs.

Lots of Eighties elements, almost references that give it its “touch”.

Our opinion

This is unfortunately, an average movie. It has funny scenes that are well filmed, but in general is nothing but one of those movies that lack a “something extra” to make it stand out.