The horror genre at Christmas time has become a strange comfort blanket of sorts. Maybe it helps to frame our fears and anxieties about the family gathering or the myriad number of plans, as if to say, “my situation isn’t that bad.”

Damien LeVeck’s latest movie A Creature Was Stirring revolves around an overprotective mother and nurse, Faith, played Chrissy Metz (This Is Us) who works tirelessly to treat her daughter Charm (Annalise Basso) by unconventional means such as locking her in her room and giving her controlled doses of methadone injections to stave off a mysterious affliction. To further complicate their situation, a pair of wanderers break into the mother and daughter’s home looking for shelter from the Christmas blizzard. The weather outside may be frightful, but the secrets lurking in this home are far worse.

A Creature Was Stirring is a movie that has a lot of promise, especially with its opening credits. Cinematographer Alexander Chinnici creates an ominous air of mystery, filming the garland and lights wrapped on the banister and wreath on the door interspliced with scientific scribblings and mythological excerpts. Sadly, the intrigue ends there. What follows is a movie that is overstuffed with ideas and revelations that come too little too late.

The biggest problem this movie has is the writing. The movie spends a lot of time unraveling its mystery and setting up double meanings for scenes and characters that the aforementioned revelations completely lose their impact. A good example of a scene that seems like an overindulgent tangent is when Faith fantasizes about having sex with Kory (Connor Paolo) dressed in a Green Lantern costume. There’s a reason for it, but the scene comes during a lull in the movie and the explanation for it happens so much further into the movie that the sequence ends up feeling more chaotic than planned.

Metz gives a performance that is a long way from her role is This Is Us – I don’t know if I’d say it was particularly good, but she gets a chance to shake off her sweet demeanor. Her involvement with this project is clearly a major selling point. In fact, Metz wielding a Negan-like bat in the trailer for A Creature Was Stirring reminds me of another home isolation movie, Stephen King’s Misery. Though of the two, I’d have to recommend the latter.

The standout part of this movie is the creature designed by Face Off’s Tate Steinsiek. Although the silhouette is reminiscent of Death Note’s Shinigami Ryuk, the design is more like an anthropomorphic mutant porcupine.

Overall, A Creature Was Stirring is an ambitious movie that, unfortunately, fails to bring all that ambition together in any meaningful way. While the various plot points somewhat work together, I can’t help but think they’d be stronger as short films: a mother with a dark past and traumatic secret, drifters seeking shelter from a storm only to become guests of the wrong host, or a terrifying monster movie.

Rating: 1/5.

A Creature Was Stirring debuts on Blu-ray & DVD February 13 and is available on Digital now.

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The writer of this piece is: Laurence Almalvez
Laurence tweets from @IL1511

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