A Creature Was Stirring (2023)

I don't even want to touch the premise of this movie until I explain a few things, because anything I tell you about what's going on in this bizarre horror flick would spoil stuff I wouldn't want to spoil. Normally, opening a review (or whatever it is I do here) that way implies I'm recommending a movie, but even that's going to be complicated. This is a movie calibrated towards a very particular kind of viewer, and even then there's a catch. The last few minutes of the film squander the goodwill it built over the previous hour and a half by pivoting in a different direction that left me rolling my eyes.

Still, the experience the movie offers up until that point is so weird and fun, I'm hesitant to give too much away upfront. So instead I'm going to start this with an attempt at describing that experience, as well as who might be interested in checking this out. As always, if at any point you start to expect you fall into that bucket, I encourage you to stop reading until you've had a chance to see the movie. I mostly enjoyed this for what it was, though - again - I really wasn't a fan of the ending.

I'll start with the overall vibe I got from this, because I suspect that will point a number of you in the right direction. More than anything else, this reminds me of the (admittedly limited number of) episodes of Tales from the Crypt I've seen. This has a strong '80s horror vibe, both in the visual style and campy tone. I'll also add it's very much a creature-feature in the vein of... well... mostly a ton of movies I was too young to see at the time and never got around to watching. But I suppose you could count movies like Gremlins in that subgenre.

I think Tales from the Crypt is the best comparison, however, if for no other reason than this shares that series' meanspirited humor. The characters aren't here to be liked - if anything, we're leaning into the idea that audiences are cheering for them to go into the dark basement alone, rather than shouting at them to stop. That's not to say these are awful people, but the point through most of the runtime is to have fun with the mayhem, rather than build empathy.

At least until the last act when everything goes off the rails and the movie pivots twice in wildly different and baffling directions, which... we'll get to that. First, a final spoiler warning to anyone who might want to experience what's mostly a quirky, amusing throwback to '80s horror with exceptional visuals, a fantastic creature design, and a premise I haven't hinted at because I'd genuinely feel bad giving it away to the wrong person. I'm not saying this is exactly a good movie, but to the right person it's absolutely a really good time.

Right then. This is a Christmas horror movie about a teenage girl whose mother keeps her locked up and medicated to prevent her from transforming into a were-porcupine. Also, there's a demon porcupine entity which may or may not be the girl's father. And a sex scene involving Green Lantern. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

There are fundamentally four characters in this (five if you count the porcupine demon, which you probably should). The teenage girl is Charm (Annalise Basso), an aspiring artist who loves Green Lantern comics and resents being trapped in her house and drugged to maintain an internal body temperature between 102 and 104.5 degrees (any lower or higher and she transforms). Her mother, Faith (Chrissy Metz), is a recovering drug addict who's devoted her life to managing her daughter's condition and searching for a cure. Kory (Connor Paolo) and Liz (Scout Taylor-Compton) are teenaged home-invaders who break in during a storm for reasons that are never fully explained. They claim to simply be lost, and Liz at least is deeply religious. They're not at all dangerous - Kory is almost immediately injured by Faith.

The bulk of the movie is spent gradually revealing weirder and weirder elements of the premise, as the characters learn about each other and see things that seem impossible. There's a surprising amount of discussion of Green Lantern comics, with a particular emphasis on the Emerald Twilight Saga, in which Hal Jordan abuses the power entrusted to him to recreate his city after it's destroyed. Mainly I'm surprised they either got permission or got away with including all of this.

That's actually setting up more than just the scene in which Kory appears dressed as Green Lantern in Faith's bedroom as green energy appears on the ceiling, but... that is something that sort of, kind of happens. Or not - we're shown cuts implying it's some sort of hallucination or illusion. Put a pin in that.

Also relevant are a couple debates between Faith and Liz concerning religion. Faith, contrary to her name, is an atheist, while Liz is a devout Christian. The movie generally paints Liz in a more sympathetic light during these exchanges, though at the end of the movie we see her flee the house when the situation becomes too intense, calling her conviction into question. Kory doesn't make it out (not that escape into the blizzard is necessarily salvation) - he winds up brutally killed by the porcupine entity. Interestingly, this wasn't his first encounter with the creature: they actually had a conversation earlier, and it let him go, only pausing to steal a photograph he'd taken. Put yet another pin here, actually.

Once Kory's dead and Liz is presumably freezing to death, Faith confronts the monster and uses a knife to cut Charm free, pulling her out of the darkness. This is all played as a somewhat out-of-place emotional catharsis in which the two characters come to terms with their pasts, their shared trauma, and their guilt in order to heal their relationship. It'd be like a cheesy B-movie suddenly deciding it wanted to be The Babadook five minutes before the ending. It's a bizarre tonal shift, but the creature effects are still cool and it's all shot and acted well enough to at least land the plane.

Or it would be if that were actually the end of the movie.

Instead, we jump forward a week and find Faith and Charm have adjusted a little too well. As Faith does some clean-up, she comes across one of those photos Kory had been looking through. It's a picture from her past, before Charm was born, and Kory is there, which means....

Sigh. Okay, so everything in the movie up to this point has essentially been warped by Faith's imagination. Remember that whole Green Lantern Emerald Twilight thing? Yeah, that was planting the seed that a person could essentially delude themself into creating a false reality. Charm wasn't a were-porcupine, there was no entity, and Liz and Kory were never there (they were just a pair of naive evangelicals who tried "saving" Faith, only for her to seduce, drug, and accidentally kill Kory with an overdose decades earlier). She really had been drugging Charm and keeping her prisoner, but when she thought Liz ran into the blizzard, it was actually her daughter. And she didn't make it far.

To be fair, from a structural standpoint this was all setup well enough with plot threads, lines of dialogue, and character beats established earlier. The Emerald Twilight stuff even gives the filmmakers cover for all the scenes where Faith isn't present (and there were many). The issue here isn't that it doesn't work on paper, but rather that it doesn't work in terms of tone, style, and genre.

We just watched a creature feature morph into a dramatic allegory to set up a twist to a false reality and unreliable narrator. I won't say it doesn't mean anything (though what it does end up appearing to mean is pretty trivial), but by this point you're left in a position you simply don't care.

I was onboard for the were-porcupine stuff. Hell, as much as I prefer happy endings, I'd have been fine with a ridiculous "everyone's killed by the weird monster" finale here. That would have felt like a satisfying resolution. I'd also have been fine with an ending that was overly happy, where they just win. Or something in the middle. But the whole "it's all fake" thing just comes off like a cheap attempt to make the movie more serious in retrospect, as if capping this with a bleak, nihilistic note erases the fact the previous eighty-five minutes were about a freaking were-porcupine.

It's frustrating, because up until the ending, it was the right kind of stupid fun. Those last five minutes leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, as if someone's lecturing you for buying into the world they created.

All right. Enough complaining about that. Let's talk Christmas.

There's some lip service towards thematic and character motives (children at the holidays, religion, faith, etc.), but honestly... the dialogue that's there feels tacked on. While the holidays are present throughout in terms of lights and decorations, there's no mention of the season until late in the movie, when it becomes a brief point of discussion between Liz and Faith. Likewise, the connections between Faith and Charm's relationship with Mary and her baby's are kind of wedged in. That stuff is present, particularly near the end, but it's not really substantive.

That's not to say the holidays aren't significant to the movie. On the contrary, they're fairly crucial to an aspect of this film I'd argue matters more this time than plot, theme, or character: they're woven into the design. More specifically, they form the backbone of the lighting, which justifies giving the movie a neon-infused color pallet harkening back to the '80s. In addition, green holiday lights help tie in the Green Lantern elements, giving the movie's eclectic references and sources a visual connection.

It's also worth noting the holiday justifies the movie's title, which does some of the heavy lifting towards establishing the right tone. Granted, that's mainly surface stuff, but... who says Christmas needs to be anything else? This uses seasonal trappings almost purely as a backdrop, but it does so in a way that's effective and visually interesting.

Until we hit that ending, director Damien LeVeck really seems to understand what kind of movie he's making, delivering one gonzo sequence after the next. Likewise, this has a solid cast, with Chrissy Metz standing out as particularly impressive. The script makes some odd choices with her character, but she seems game to sell them all in their respective moments.

If it weren't for that ending, this would be easy to recommend to genre fans. As it is, I'm inclined to recommend viewers give it a shot, albeit with the warning the last few minutes are almost certainly going to come off as obnoxious. But until then, the absurd entertainment value of watching something commit this completely to a premise this outlandish - and more importantly deliver technical, practical effects up to the task - is worth a bit of disappointment.