‘Lockbox’ Review: Carla Gugino Anchors A Podcast Adaptation That Shifts From Small-Town Thriller To Full-On Horror

Halloween rolls around, and with it comes, even more than during the rest of the year, a wave of horror movies that fit the bitter definition of “one of the bunch.” Lockbox has a premise and development that, at least for its first two-thirds, make it feel more like a thriller with a few supernatural touches. But in its final half-hour, it cuts loose and fully embraces the genre, losing the relative control it had maintained up to that point and introducing characters and situations that seem to have been imported from another movie featuring some of the same actors. In any case, at 105 minutes, it ends up being more tedious than disturbing, more boring than daring.

Based on one of more than a hundred episodes of a horror podcast called Knifepoint Horror, apparently an online phenomenon that has been around for more than 15 years, the film takes one of those episodes — originally titled “Winthrop” — and expands and adapts it for the big screen. Co-written by the podcast’s creator, Soren Narnia, and Justin Yoffe, Lockbox stars Ellen (Carla Gugino), a woman who, after spending years taking care of her mother, moves to another city and into a house she inherited from her family. There, she seems to settle into a new life, helping out at the local parish and working as a caregiver for people with physical or mental health problems.

The person who shows up on her doorstep looking for a place to stay is her cousin Winthrop (now-fortysomething Lou Taylor Pucci, who was once the teenage star of films like Thumbsucker two decades ago), a troubled, taciturn war veteran who clearly needs some kind of specialized care or medication. Beyond a certain amount of natural awkwardness — having to share a bathroom is a problem in itself — things between them seem to work reasonably well until a loud neighbor named Vahna (Katherine Isabelle) starts sticking her nose into their business. She regards the newcomer with a mixture of fear and provocation, making Winthrop increasingly uncomfortable.

The tension escalates until, one day, Vahna turns up brutally murdered. All eyes immediately turn to the taciturn Winthrop, who, to make matters worse, has a habit of wandering around in the middle of the night, apparently sleepwalking. He is arrested and put on trial, but Ellen does everything she can to get him out. And that’s when we begin to see that, beyond the affection his cousin feels for him, Winthrop really does harbor some cruel and violent tendencies. Is he the killer, or are there other, somewhat less explainable forces at work?

Up to a certain point, Lockbox works as a relatively grounded thriller in which Ellen struggles with the possibility that her cousin might actually be a violent criminal. But from there, Daniel Stamm begins to suggest that some of the violent acts taking place cannot be understood through ordinary logic. Could there be some kind of entity or supernatural force lurking around the area? Or is this traumatized war veteran simply hiding the instincts of a potential killer?

The movie has one reasonably clever idea — revealing it would be a spoiler, so I won’t — but once the blood starts flowing on screen, it turns into a free-for-all. At first, it does so gradually, reconnecting some of the threads established earlier. Then it introduces a series of new “elements” and even new characters that push the whole thing firmly into genre territory, tossing aside much of what had been carefully constructed up to that point.

The final half-hour of Lockbox is little more than a showcase for visual and sound effects that lead nowhere dramatically, a catalog of carefully engineered scares designed to bring the entire narrative machinery to some sort of belated payoff. It doesn’t work. And the movie slowly but inexorably sinks under its own weight.