Cobweb
Sooner or later, family secrets creep out.
Eight year old Peter is plagued by a mysterious, constant tapping from inside his bedroom wall—one that his parents insist is all in his imagination. As Peter's fear intensifies, he believes that his parents could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trustworthiness.
Why watch Cobweb
Antony Starr's unsettling turn as a parent hiding something sinister anchors this claustrophobic nightmare—he brings the same magnetic menace that made him unforgettable in Invincible, but weaponized in the suffocating confines of a suburban home. Cobweb operates in that A24 sweet spot where psychological dread outpaces jump scares, letting the tapping in the walls become less a sound effect and more a symbol of childhood paranoia metastasizing into something real and terrifying.
The film moves with surgical precision: what begins as a child's anxiety spirals into genuine body horror and domestic terror that recalls the best of Ari Aster's work—intimate, grotesque, impossible to look away from. Director Samuel Eglington trusts his young lead, Woody Norman, to carry the mounting hysteria without ever winking at the camera, which makes every creeping revelation hit harder than expected.
This is for anyone who found Hereditary devastating or who remembers being a kid and wondering if adults were lying to you. Cobweb weaponizes that primal fear and doesn't blink. You'll leave the film questioning what you saw in those final frames—and whether Peter's parents were monsters all along, or something far worse.
— The What2Watch desk · US
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The story
Eight year old Peter is plagued by a mysterious, constant tapping from inside his bedroom wall—one that his parents insist is all in his imagination. As Peter's fear intensifies, he believes that his parents could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret and questions their trustworthiness.
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Reviews & ratings
Cobweb taps into well worn horror concepts and delivers something a little different but hardly surprising. We all know from the get go, what Cobweb represents in broad terms. A tale of a child, locked away by its parents, because its different and more than a little, sinister. Stepping beyond the predictable, is a few tweaks that set this horror film apart. Mostly, in a good way. Cleverly re-working aspects of…Show more
Woody Norman is quite good in this otherwise rather routine horror movie. He is only eight years old when he suddenly starts hearing noises coming from the walls of their old wooden house. His parents initially try to assuage his concerns but when his well-meaning teacher "Miss Divine" (Cleopatra Coleman) shows them a drawing he made at school, the atmosphere at home becomes distinctly frosty. When the knocking noise…Show more
I found it to be a bit boring. 2/3 into the movie, things finally start to happen! Up til then, I found Lizzy Caplan's performance wooden and stiff, and the same for Antony Starr. Woody Norman and Cleopatra Coleman were good, the story is decent enough, but it was all I could do to endure the odd performances to reach the anti-climactic ending. The few scares were old formulas. Sad effort.
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