Review: Thriller 'Come Play' details the fears of a mother trying to reach her autistic son
An autistic boy and his parents must confront monsters and other terrors in “Come Play,” a sharp and tense debut from director-writer Jacob Chase.
Oliver — played by Azhy Robertson, who portrayed the son at the heart of the custody dispute in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” — is a third-grader who has non-verbal autism. He works to integrate into a regular school, with an aide and a speaking app on his smartphone. But he has no friends, with one kid, Byron (Winslow Fegley, recently seen in “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made” on Disney+), going out of his way to bully him.
Things at home aren’t going well, either. His mom, Sarah (Gillian Jacobs), labors to do everything to help him, and gets exasperated at her less-than-attentive husband, Marty (John Gallagher Jr.), to the point where he’s sleeping on the couch most nights.
One day, Byron tosses Oliver’s phone, his only communications lifeline, into a field. His dad soon provides a replacement: A tablet that he liberated from the lost-and-found at his dead-end late-shift job as a parking-lot attendant. The tablet soon delivers something strange: A story about “misunderstood monsters,” specifically Larry, a lonely creature who just wants a friend. But there’s something sinister about this e-book Babadook, which Oliver senses but has trouble communicating that dread to his parents.
Chase, who adapted his feature debut from an earlier short, generates some well-earned jump scares as he incorporates this old-school creeper into an augmented-reality monster — a creature who appears on a screen, but is invisible but dangerous in the physical world. The work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to make lonely Larry appear realistically terrifying.
The atmosphere is deepened by the movie’s sensitive handling of Oliver’s autism. The plot hinges, in part, on Sarah’s understanding of what Oliver needs and how he communicates — which involves the recurring mention of “SpongeBob SquarePants.” (You may scoff, but there’s something to this, as anyone who saw the documentary “Life, Animated,” can confirm.)
Jacobs’ performance is perfectly grounded, and attuned to Robertson’s incredible portrayal of Oliver, which never lets the character become just the sum of his awkward tics. As “Come Play” unfolds, it does more than deliver some Halloween chills, but it reminds us that there’s nothing scarier to a mother than something bad happening to her child.
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‘Come Play’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for terror, frightening images and some language. Running time: 96 minutes.