October Horror Challenge 2022 #60: "Come Play"

I've never heard of this movie until I got Showtime on my Amazon Prime subscription and this was one of the horror movies they recommended to me because I watched "Hereditary" yesterday. I've never heard about this movie before, but it's about a little boy who is autistic, and I've got lots of experience with autism, so I'm interested to see how this movie handles the subject.

This movie is about a little boy named Oliver who is autistic, so he has trouble making friends and communicating his feelings and what is going on around him. He uses his phone to communicate, typing out words in a text to speech program so his phone can help him express what he's feeling. This works well for him until the day when a gruesome monster takes over his tablet and uses it to enter his world. Now his mother must find a way to save her son before he is killed by the monster who wants to "come play."

This movie kind of reminds me of The Babadook in that it has a monster that communicates through a children's book, trying to reach out into the child's world except in this movie the creature talks to the kid through his screens, the iPad and the phone and even the TV in one memorable scene. I give kudos to the parents in this movie, though. unlike parents in other movies who refuse to believe anything otherworldly is going on even as evidence piles up around them, the parents in this movie catch on pretty quick to the fact that there's a monster after their kid and they have to do something to stop it. That saves me time screaming at the parents in this movie while they refuse to listen to me. I hardly had to scream at all during this movie.

This is a pretty typical monster movie when you get right down to it. The setting is different, because this monster is tech savvy and uses modern technology to reach out into our world and try to claim his victims, and the autistic kid adds another layer to the story, but once those trappings are stripped away, you have a fairly standard monster flick with the monster chasing the mother and son through the house and outside, trying to take the kid's soul. it's a well done monster movie, though, so I didn't mind. This movie was a fun little monster movie, and I really enjoyed it in the end.