This low-budget horror thriller comes with an almighty directorial last name, but Steven\u2019s daughter Destry serves up precious little that is classically Spielbergian in her debut feature. Forget Dad\u2019s signature childlike wonder; the youngsters in this post-apocalyptic outing \u2013 ostracised because minors are asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals \u2013 are completely feral, opportunistic and worryingly keen to kill. Spielberg\u2019s film is a surprisingly nihilistic, if uneven, splicing of 21st-century young-adult and 1970s exploitation flicks.<\/p>\n
After making a break for the border, roving juvenile Mary (Zoe Colletti) takes up with a band of orphans squatting a nearby community centre. Leader Ben (Andrew Liner) is wounded during a botched armed robbery on a service station, so they take refuge in an isolated house. The unlikely owner is plummy, sardonic Brit Clara (Downton Abbey\u2019s Michelle Dockery) \u2013 who stitches him up and deems that what these wastrels really need is a big plate of cookies. When the group wake up imprisoned in Clara\u2019s attic, it should only reinforce rule number one: never eat the cookies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mary is spared the sequestration because Clara views her as a potential replacement for her own daughter, part of the 1% of children who succumbed to the pandemic. So the youngster is installed in a flowery bedroom and forced to placate her captor like in Misery, and so the film enters into interestingly queasy gothic-fairytale terrain. But Spielberg balances it uneasily with the pure horror taking place upstairs, not quite satisfactorily constructing one or the other. As the group is shunted off one-by-one to a cold shower and an unspeakable fate in an adjacent room, the wan characterisation means the tension only intermittently smoulders. Breaking Bad\u2019s Giancarlo Esposito periodically peps it up as a nosy sheriff.<\/p>\n
Please Don\u2019t Feed the Children also has unfortunately frequent recourse to lazy storytelling shortcuts, with characters making ill-advised decisions or conveniently waking early from drug-induced stupors. But Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there\u2019s an edginess to Spielberg\u2019s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.<\/p>\n
Please Don\u2019t Feed the Children is on digital platforms from 29 September and on DVD from 20 October.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This low-budget horror thriller comes with an almighty directorial last name, but Steven\u2019s daughter Destry serves up precious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-176449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}