SON (2021)

| Horror, Thriller |

Director(s): Ivan Kavanagh

Writer(s): Ivan Kavanagh

Cast: Andi Matichak, Emile Hirsch, Luke David Blumm

Release Date (Theaters): Mar 5, 2021  Limited

Release Date (Streaming): Mar 5, 2021

Runtime: 1h 38m

Son is a 2021 Irish supernatural horror film about a mother who must decide how far she will go to protect her boy from terrifying forces.

PLOT:

Having escaped from a demonic cult as a child, a mother’s past catches up with her when its sinister members break into her home and attempt to steal her eight-year-old boy for their ritual. Now on the run with her son, he becomes deathly sick. Something has changed in him since his aborted kidnap. Doctors are baffled and only a sharp police detective seems to believe her story.

Having observed that her boy makes a miraculous recovery when he has tasted human blood, she follows her maternal instinct by committing murder to keep her son alive. However, after numerous unspeakable acts, she is still losing the battle with the demon growing inside him and questions how she can save her son.

REVIEW:

Son puts an interesting spin on stories featuring characters on the run (think Firestarter, or more recently Midnight Special) where both parent and child are suffering from some form of illness. In the case of Laura (Andi Matichak of the new Halloween trilogy, startlingly good here with material that could have come across laughable without the right dramatic delivery), we are unsure whether she really is seeing members of the former cult she escaped eight years ago that are now trying to kidnap her child for some kind of satanic ritual, or if the cult even exists and she’s just a deeply mentally unwell person at the hands of a traumatic upbringing.