Review: 'What Comes Around' is a cautionary thriller about dating in the internet age — until it takes a sharp turn into something creepy

It’s nearly impossible to talk about what goes wrong in “What Comes Around,” because the problem is a twist that doesn’t work — and I’m not going to give it away, even though it’s why director Amy Redford’s intimate thriller goes off the rails.

Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, who adapts his play “The Thing With Feathers,” start with Anna (Grace Van Dien), a high-school girl who’s spending a lot of time on her computer and on FaceTime, talking to a guy she met online. That guy, Eric (Kyle Gallner), charms Anna with his appreciation of Emily Dickinson and his brooding charm. 

Anna doesn’t tell her mom, Beth (Summer Phoenix), at first. Mom’s preoccupied anyway, since she’s freshly sporting an engagement ring from her boyfriend, Tim (Jesse Garcia), who’s the town’s assistant police chief.

But when Eric tells Anna that he wants to see her in person — and Anna sees on FaceTime that he’s saying that while standing on her front porch — telling Beth becomes a necessity. And when Beth gets one look at Eric, her response is unvarnished: “Get the hell out of my house.”

Everything I’ve described so far is in the trailer. And it all happens before the sharp turn Organ’s script takes right into a ditch.

The sharp turn is, on one level, lurid and creepy. It’s also a narrative dead-end, a “check, please” moment from which the sharpest screenwriter would find hard to recover.

Redford — directing her second movie, after the 2008 cancer drama “The Guitar” — constructs a tight, claustrophobic thriller, getting strong performances from Van Dien (“Stranger Things”) and Phoenix (“SLC Punk!”) as a daughter and mother learning hard truths about each other. She also gets a lot of solid visuals on a fast timeline, filming in 16 days in Park City, Utah, with mostly local crews. 

It’s almost enough to overcome the pothole in the middle of Organ’s script — but almost doesn’t count.

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‘What Comes Around’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexual dialogue and language. Running time: 85 minutes.