The first full feature written and directed by John Ross, someone who seems to have been learning his craft over a number of years spent directing TV episodes and short films, Grimcutty is a horror movie that shows a manifestation of fear created while kids and teenagers become more and more engrossed in an online trend.
Our lead character is Asha (Sara Wolfkind), a young woman who spends some of her free time making ASMR videos for her YouTube channel. She isn’t reaching a huge audience, but she likes to think she is making progress. Like many other teens, her phone is her everything, whether it is for communicating with friends or making and uploading her videos. But there are times when her parents (played by Shannyn Sossamon and Usman Ally) try to spend time as a family without any distractions from mobile tech devices. This becomes even more of a priority when they hear about Grimcutty, a social media trend that has children pretending they see a strange creature before then attempting to harm themselves. Except . . . They’re not pretending. Not sure they trying to harm themselves. Grimcutty is out to get them, but the parents can’t see it.
This is another film that I forgot to review when I watched it the first time around, and the only reason for that was time and scheduling. Having seen many other people dismiss this, I was pleasantly surprised by something that tried to make the most of a fairly silly premise. It gets straight into the Grimcutty scares, and the creature is an interesting sight, not a million miles away from Death Note’s Ryuk, before the plot takes one or two interesting tangents on the way to a horribly disappointing final act. I wonder if it is the finale that soured many others on it, or if it was just too tame for those looking for some better scares.
Working well enough within certain limitations, Ross convincingly shows some teens in terror and numerous parents succumbing to overwhelming fear and a need to protect their children at all cost. A couple of key scenes help to show how the Grimcutty issue is affecting local citizens, but you it would have been nice to see a much bigger picture (either within the same zip code or possibly even nationwide). Considering some of the central ideas, Ross does a pretty good job of presenting some disturbing/potentially triggering content with a lack of ambiguity around the main characters. Nobody here actively wants to harm themselves, we viewers always know that Grimcutty is making it look that way.
The cast are a mixed bag, but Wolfkind is excellent in the lead role. She is believable and easy to root for at all times, and I even enjoyed the small clips showing her ASMR work (not my thing, but I am sure fans of that content can take that as a small extra plus point). Sossamon and Ally are generally fine as the parents, although the latter has to spend most of the second half of the movie becoming twitchy and harmfully obsessed in a way the viewers know could endanger the lives of those he is wanting to keep safe. It’s a real shame, and I think keeping him more ignorant and helpless could have been a much better decision. Others do what they need to do, whether they are helping or hindering our lead, but the only other person I will namecheck is Callan Farris, playing the younger brother who makes up the endangered central family unit. Farris isn’t overused, and he feels just right for his role, and the fate of his character really helps to make the finale better than it otherwise would have been.
There are a number of different directions that this could have gone, and most of them seem better than what we ultimately got, but I still enjoyed this for what it is. There is at least one great idea at the very heart of it, a really good lead, and a central creation that sits perfectly between fanciful silliness and very real threat. While the flaws become more obvious as I keep thinking on it, I had a perfectly good time with this while I was watching it.
6/10
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