Crew
Director – Damien LeVeck, Screenplay – Shannon Wells, Producers – Aaron B. Koontz, Atkin Korkis, Damien LeVeck, Natalie LeVeck & Vladislav Severtsev, Photography – Alexander Chinnici, Music – Matthew O’Malley, Visual Effects – Aleksey Vasin, Creature Effects – Ill Willed Productions (Designer – Tate Steinsiek), Production Design – Jeff McLied. Production Company – Skubalon/Paper Street Pictures/10-09 Films.
Cast
Chrissy Metz (Faith Lawson), Annalise Basso (Charm Lawson), Connor Paolo (Kory), Scout Taylor-Compton (Liz)
Plot
It is nearing Christmas in Middleton, Kentucky. Faith Lawson lives with her teenage daughter Charm, who she has to keep imprisoned in her room. Faith, a former nurse, tries to regulate Charm’s condition, maintaining her temperature within a narrow range using home remedies. They are abruptly interrupted as teenage brother and sister Kory and Liz break into the house. During the course of this, Faith wounds Kory and reluctantly lets them stay on as she tends his injury. However, Kory and Liz’s curiosity leads them to meet Charm and want to help her, unaware that doing so will let the creature inside her free.
A Creature Was Stirring was the second directorial outing for Damien LeVeck. LeVeck had emerged as an editor on various reality tv shows and then made the short horror film The Cleansing Hour (2016), which he was given funding to expand as a feature with The Cleansing Hour (2016). A Creature Was Stirring was a production from sometimes director Aaron B. Koontz – see Camera Obscura (2017), The Pale Door (2020) – who has been racking up some quite reasonable credits as a producer since the end of the 2010s under his Paper Street Pictures production company banner.
Right from the outset, A Creature Was Stirring has a WTF weirdness. There are the opening scenes that introduce us to mother Chrissy Metz and daughter Annalise Basso, before Annalise is locked in her room, places on a football helmet and then we see her battering herself around the room. Later we see her under a blanket throwing herself all over the room.
A Creature Was Stirring emerges as a tight, contained drama. The setting never ventures beyond a single suburban home and the film draws its effect out of the interactions of the four characters. A sense of mystery about what is happening runs throughout. Damien LeVeck draws all of these out with some fine tensions. He also makes great use of coloured lighting schemes throughout.
The film’s most well-known name is Scout Taylor-Compton, who has been a genre regular ever since playing Laurie Strode in Halloween (2007). That said, Taylor-Compton is the one actor of the four in the cast who is on screen the least. The name I was impressed with is Chrissy Metz playing the mother. She gives a fine performance but what bowled me over was the fact that the film was willing to cast quite a large plus-size woman in the central role, something that is almost unheard of in a Hollywood film.
The oddest part of the film is a fascination with DC’s Green Lantern – several comic-books are seen throughout. At one point, Annalise Basso even gives a recounting of the Emerald Twilight (1994) storyline where Hal Jordan went insane and recreated the destroyed Coast City using his ring – something that proves relevant when we come to the film’s twist ending. We even get the bizarreness of Chrissy Metz having a Green Lantern sexual fantasy at one point.
The only point for me that A Creature Was Stirring falters is at the ending. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Here it conducts a Conceptual Reversal Twist of the first M. Night Shyamalan order. Exactly what happens is the cause of some debate around the internet. It was also an explanation that left me unsure about some aspects – like when Chrissy Metz says she used to corrupt young people, what exactly does she mean? It seems to involve having sex with them and injecting them with something. The ending also left me unclear as to whether the daughter was actually suffering any condition or it was just all in Chrissy’s imagination.
Trailer here