There's Something Wrong with the Children

Margaret and Ben take a weekend trip with two old friends and their two young children. After the kids disappear in the woods, and then return seemingly unharmed, Ben begins to suspect that something is wrong with the children…

In a nutshell, the story goes like this…

Two couples go to a cabin for a weekend getaway in the thick brush of the Texan wilderness. They’ve been friends for a long time, but their lives have taken different paths. The different paths in question are that one couple is childless, and the other couple isn’t. The latter couple brings their kids to the weekend getaway. But while the kids are briefly under the childless couple’s supervision, the children happen across a weird flower, which sprays them with a weird pollen, which causes them to jump into a creepy pit, which kills them both.

Upon discovering this, the childless couple is understandably like… whoops.

But when the childless couple get back to the cabin, ready to deliver the bad news to the kids’ parents, the kids are there waiting for them. They’re alive, with no memory of jumping in the pit at all, but also… they’re strange. Noticeably strange.

Like, very obviously evil kid strange.

It turns out, the kids are now a lot like Edgar in Men In Black, giant bugs wearing human skins, just without the amazing performance by Vincent D’Onofrio. The giant bugs then spend some time fucking with the one guy in the childless couple who has realized the truth, a man with a history of mental illness, and the bugs seem to delight in the fact that no one believes him. Eventually, the bugs start killing the other adults and throw them in the pit so that other bugs have skin-suits to wear.

After that, it’s a pretty typical struggle for survival.

But are they evil sentient bugs? Are they demons, or maybe aliens? That is unclear. Whatever they are, how did they get in that pit in the first place? Do they live there? Are they stuck there? Also unclear. Did the bugs put the flower there? …unclear. Why are the bugs even doing this? To escape the pit? Or is it Instinct? Is this an invasion? Is it just for food? Is it because it’s the only way they can ride the rides at Six Flags? Or, are they just being dicks? Again… it’s unclear. I don’t even know what to say about that. They provide zero answers.

At least they’re consistent, I guess?

Also, after watching the film, to me at least, it’s a 50/50 toss up as whether or not the creators actually intended it to be a metaphor for the inevitable widening divide that happens between friend groups when some of them start having kids and others don’t, while also touching on the pressure that society puts on couples to have kids, despite any reasons they may or may not have not to have kids…

OR…

Are the creators actually specifically talking about their own personal lives? Is this film actually nothing more than a poorly-disguised rant about one of their own friend-couples who have children now, because they believe that those children “ruin all the fun now,” especially when it comes to their little Texas Horror Film Scene dreams?

Like I said… it’s a toss-up.

Because there’s also a pretty decent chance that the creators truly believe that this film is actually about the “dangers of gaslighting” and the struggle that comes with having mental health issues, even though it doesn’t have anything to say about either of these ideas.

Or maybe I’m reading into it. I don’t know, but if so, I’d lay the blame for that squarely at the feet of the film’s poor execution. Like I said… it’s all unclear.

All that aside, it has a bunch of other issues too. Like how the film’s commitment to the one kid wearing a “devil” hoodie as the main indicator of the sudden change in the children is a microcosm of the film’s poor understanding of subtlety. Conversely, at the same time, another big issue is the film’s inability to embrace the general lack of subtlety that is usually a hallmark of this genre. I mean, this is a horror film, surely there’s a better way to show us some of the alleged horror that happens instead of just telling us about it, right? All of this before you even get into the typical issues of a low budget film, from the very “local actor” feeling of the performances, to the “friend of a friend’s cabin” feeling of the location, to the poorly conveyed sense of geography of the area where the film takes place, or the uninspired directing in general…

In the end, the reality is that There’s Something Wrong With The Children is a movie with some potentially interesting ideas, hampered by its subpar execution.