"There's Something Wrong with the Children" makes for a rock-solid entry in the "Kids Suck" subgenre

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

If horror movies involving creepy children teach adults anything, it’s that no one should give birth ever. Following in the footsteps of 1976’s “Who Can Kill a Child?” (or its 2013 effective remake “Come Out and Play”) and 2008’s “The Children,” director Roxanne Benjamin’s “There’s Something Wrong with the Children” is further proof that other people’s kids can be little monsters, especially when they enter an old ruin and transform into changelings. Director Benjamin and writers T.J. Cimfel and David White (2016’s “Intruders”) take familiar anxieties and wring a new nightmare out of them.

Ben (Zach Gilford) and Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) take a weekend trip to two separate cabins with their best-friend couple, Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos), along with their two kids, Lucy (Brielle Guiza) and Spencer (David Mattle). They find the ruins of an old fort and explore for a bit before the kids are entranced by a shine at the bottom of a dark hole—“the place that shines”—and start having nosebleeds. After Ben and Margaret offer to give Ellie and Thomas some time alone, they let the kids sleep in their cabin. Come morning, Lucy and Spencer are gone. Ben checks out the old fort, and sure enough, Lucy and Spencer are there before jumping off the ledge into the pit of the abyss. Horrified, Ben stumbles back to the cabins to find…Lucy and Spencer, who are apparently alive and well. But guess what? There’s something wrong with those children.

“There’s Something Wrong with the Children” is unapologetically about what it’s about—this is a horror movie with the Blumhouse approval after all—albeit not without something to say about human issues. In terms of The Gifted’s overblown score and the opening and ending title font, director Benjamin (2019’s “Body at Brighton Rock”) brings a retro ‘80s aesthetic, but this is an otherwise modern tale about adulthood and would-be parenthood. Even after something is already clearly wrong with the children—and the other adults think Ben is having another manic episode as he has had in the past—there is great tension between friends. Their struggles begin on a relationship level; Ellie and Thomas swapped partners one drunken night and need to reconnect, and Ben and Margaret are on different pages with having children. What each of them divulges about the other just keeps adding fuel to the flame that is about to incinerate them all. Lucy and Spencer’s mind games that make Ben look crazy are also disturbing and darkly humorous.

The actors are all rock-solid, each couple making their individual relationship woes feel completely authentic. Alisha Wainwright (2021’s “Palmer”), in particular, is our heroine sprung in survival mode. While some of her decisions in escaping may seem silly, she’s an easy one to root for as Wainwright lays the groundwork for Margaret. Once the terror really begins, Benjamin knows exactly what she’s doing, ratcheting up the tension in and around one cabin. She also introduces an unexpectedly icky kind of monster in these children without an exposition dump. In spite of an overly abrupt ending, there’s nothing wrong with another entry in the oversaturated “Evil Kid” sub-genre. 

Grade: B -

Paramount Home Entertainment will release “There’s Something Wrong with the Children” (92 min.) on digital and on demand on January 17, 2023 and will be available on MGM+ on March 17, 2023.