Shut In (2016)

Shut In arrives with a title that promises confinement and delivers mostly a real estate listing. Naomi Watts plays Mary, a child psychologist tending to her vegetative stepson in a rural New England house while an ice storm seals the roads. The film is a domestic thriller of the old school: a woman alone, a house that creaks, a deranged male who has been walking through the dark all along. Its cultural inventory is thin, and the film seems untroubled by that.

A deaf-mute boy named Tom drifts through the margins, played by a hearing actor, his deafness serving as a mechanism for silence and misdirection instead of a portrait of a life. The supporting cast is modestly varied and no more. Mary is the only figure of consequence, and she exists to be bound, gagged and bathed by her stepson. The film places a woman in peril and calls it a plot. That is a tradition, not an argument, and it mounts no critique of the arrangements it depicts.

Elsewhere there is little to file. Race never enters the frame as a subject. The storm is weather, not a climate warning. Nobody mentions money, class, or the machinery of capital. The body is a surface for suspense, most memorably in a bathtub, which reads as exploitation and not affirmation. Deafness and a vegetative state serve as horror furniture. No history is revised, no sermon is delivered, no moral is extracted. The remaining inventory is a competent-looking thriller that squanders a good cast and a better premise. A genre exercise with a faint trace of inclusive casting and a woman in a nightgown. The sommelier sends it back.