Movie Nation

“The craftsmanship in here  is just terrifying!” one wag declares in “Escape Room,” a line perhaps meant to flatter the director or the screenwriters.

He’s talking about the production design, the intricate clockwork puzzle “rooms” that six strangers must reason their way out of…or DIE. And he’s got a point. From the upside down pool hall/tap room to the cabin in the (frozen) woods to the waiting room that turns into a literal oven — “What the literal HELL” one character opines, the best line from a movie in 2019 (so far) — the places our sextet must get out of are clever conceits.

But the movie? Preposterous at the start, growing more ridiculous the longer it goes on. Because it does go on, well after the climax, blundering its way into explanations that are unexplainable, offering up the logic of the set-up when there is no logic, trying to gin up one last sliver of sympathy for a cast we don’t really have the chance to care about as they’re picked off in the best Edgar Allen Poe/Agatha Christie tradition.

A brief opening act lets us meet the shy but very smart Zoey (Taylor Russell of “Lost in Space”), the high-powered stock broker (Jay Ellis of TV’s “Insecure”) and embittered grocery strockroom drunk Ben (Logan Miller).

They all have holes in their lives, and they all get these elaborate puzzle boxes, invitations to a night in an escape room, where they meet the fire-scarred Army vet (Deborah Ann Woll), the veteran trucker (Tyler Labine, the least convincing in this cast) and the annoying escape-room/gaming nerd Danny (Nik Dodani), who enthusiastically explains the “real life video game” concept of escape rooms to the rest.

In an instant, they’re hurled into their first predicament. Only it’s too real, the consequences plainly too deadly. They collect clues and get out by the skin of their teeth. A couple fume, “Who DOES this?” They get what just happened. “Game Boy” buzzes “Talk about IMMERSIVE” and promises that “It’ll be fun from now on.”

If by “fun” he means death by baking, death by drowning, death by falling, death at the hands of fellow competitors.  Of course he’s wrong.

The assorted puzzles and clues — “You’ll go down in history” hints at what famous Christmas song? What might the presence of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” portend in a room that turns into “an Easy Bake Oven?” — are pallid.

We’ve already seen a prologue “three days earlier,” where one character who can’t read Latin scrambles to escape a “Star Wars” trash compactor room with “Acta est Fabula” (the story is done) carved on the walls.

But flashbacks give us the trauma that tested each game player earlier in life, even as parts of the game customized to play on each character’s worst fears.

Yes, the “Game Master” is omnipotent, even though his name isn’t “Jigsaw.”

None of the actors save for Woll have much in their character’s construction to make them memorable. Ellis has a nice, nasty Darwinian edge to play in dog-eat-dog Jason.

Nobody should expect much out of a film released in the tundra of the January cinema season, but I was willing to buy into this as a time-killer until the movie, like the games and game-master, stops playing by the rules it sets up.

And the year may be young, but Hollywood is going to be hard pressed to come up with a climax that is more anti-climactic than the many anti-climaxes that bring down the curtain on “Escape Room,” the first official dog of the new year.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror/perilous action, violence, some suggestive material and language

Cast: Taylor Russell, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Logan Miller, Nik Dodani, Jay Ellis,

Credits: Directed by Adam Robitel, script by Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik. A Columbia release.

Running time: 1:40

“State Like Sleep” is a murder mystery without a lot of mystery to it, perhaps without even a “murder.”

It’s a moody but somewhat empty and frustrating character study set mostly in Belgium in the aftermath of a rising film star’s sad suicide.

Or was it? A suicide, I mean?

Stefan (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones”) has just landed his big “franchise” break. He liked his coke and heroin. He might have been cheating on his wife, which had him depressed because she was moving out. His childhood friend (Luke Evans) is being awfully cagey about the death. His mother (Hélène Cardona) see-saws between blaming his wife and venting about her need for his money.

And it took two shots from his gun to kill him.

That’s piques the curiosity of his widow, played with a poker-faced grief by Katherine Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” “Alien: Covenant” and “Logan Lucky.” Not right away, though. She has to work up the desire to care. As do we.

Katherine the widow is gutted, in denial. A year has passed and she’s thrown herself into her fashion photography, not dealing with Stefan’s death or the detritus of the life they had together.

Her mother (Mary Kay Place) has flown to Belgium to tidy this up with Stefan’s mother Anika. But she has “a minuscule stroke,” and that forces Katherine to return to the scene of the tragedy, to face the callous box of personal effects the police left for her, effects which include the gun that killed him.

Katherine must also face Anika’s rage — “This is YOUR mess!” — her own guilt, underlined by memories of the police interrogation, her certainty that she caused Stefan’s shame spiral. But she develops vague suspicions about the club owner “We were friends from childhood, you know” Emile (Evans) and the creepy American (Michael Shannon) who drinks, picks up women and hits on her in the hotel they’re both staying in and seems always under foot.

Writer-director Meredith Danluck (“The Ride”) waters down the tension, the grief, pretty much every emotion demanded here, by spreading her story between the fictive present — a year after Stefan’s death — and flashbacks to the day he died. Throw in Katherine’s trips to check on Belgian medicine’s treatment of her hospitalized (and comatose) mother, and you’ve got a story that never gets up enough steam to draw us in.

Katherine finds herself photographing the mysterious American, repulsed by him (he appears to be hiring hookers) and yet…determined to have sex with him.

Perhaps her Belgian bar pick-up who turns out to have a “thing” for baths, women in those baths, women covered in bubbles and women who need to have their hair scrubbed, is what sends her over the edge.

“Could you plizz make your hair vet?”

As Katherine asks questions edgy, mysterious Emile, Emile’s eager-to-please-anyone and everyone lady friend (Bo Martyn), Anika and the cops, she remembers her own actions the day of the death and recoils in horror from the police who won’t hear her new “theories” out.

“We all have a responsibility to protect his image.”

Considering the cocaine and heroin that gets passed around, Katherine’s half-hearted pursuit of “the REAL killer” in between snorts and bar pick-ups, “image” is not something anybody in Belgium would appear to be that concerned with.

Waterston doesn’t show us much here that makes us connect with the character. Shannon plays another version of his oft-evident off-putting intensity. Why wouldn’t she be frightened of him rather than attracted to him?

Evans gives Emile a bisexual bend that makes his the most interesting character, the most inscrutable, and the most disappointingly under-developed — after Wasterton’s Katherine.

I’d say writer-director Danluck’s story unravels entirely too easily, but that’s crediting her with “raveling” that she never quite gets around to.

“State Like Sleep” is how Katherine wanders through her story, and without more narrative drive, suspense and pace, that describes the viewer’s reaction to the the film as well, unfortunately.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, sexual situations, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Katherine Waterston, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Mary Kay Place, Hélène Cardona, Michiel Huisman

Credits: Written and directed by  Meredith Danluck.  An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:45

“Rust Creek” is a classic 85 minute thriller in a 105 minute wrapper, a visceral enough hillbilly meth cooks take a hostage tale whose many sins might be corrected by pacing.

It’s reasonably well thought-out and cast, but it’s slow. And with slack pacing come sloppy lapses in logic, delaying the inevitable in ways that aren’t helpful.

Hermione Corfield of “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” is Sawyer Scott, a Kentucky college coed we meet as she runs laps. She’s fit, she’s confident of this job interview she has in D.C. and perhaps too confident in her ancient Jeep Grand Cherokee and her phone’s GPS.

Because yelling at the phone in the middle of Appalachia never helps.

“This doesn’t make any sense. Just REROUTE me!”

Sawyer is lost, and the good ol’boys who offer “assistance” are a reminder that there’s no such thing as “good” ol’boys in the movies.

“These woods, they can be a crazy place,” offers the smarter brother (Micah Hauptman, oozing bad intentions). “You look upset.”

He gets her map out of her hands, and he’s sidling over to cut her off from her car door when she trots out her college campus #MeToo defense — “You’re starting to make me feel uncomfortable.” The boys (Daniel R. Hill is brother Buck) underestimate the college girl. She fights like a Fury, bloodies them both and even though she gets stabbed in the leg, makes her escape.

But then she’s into the woods with just the clothes on her back, her wits and some good old fashioned screenwriting “coincidences” to save her on this long Thanksgiving weekend.

She eludes capture, but her wound turns bad and the weather isn’t helping. Being tough, she waits a day or so before bursting into tears. It’s the blacking out that pays-off, though, as a mysterious stranger (Jay Paulson) comes along.

But this guy living in the rotting-out mobile home is no salvation. He’s a meth cooker, and like everybody else in this corner of Kentucky, he’s related to Sawyer’s tormentors. She proceeds to lose most of her assertive (not passive) edge and learn the chemistry of “cooking” as she hides from the siblings who keep showing up to check on the work.

An oddly-unconcerned sheriff (Sean O’Bryan) should be on the “abandoned vehicle” case, but isn’t. His deputy (Jeremy Glazer) isn’t the only one trying to get him interested.

And the plot thickens as the meth cooks, the “hostage” and her guard bond over “chemistry,” and we get a heaping helping of meth cooking instructions and chemical foreshadowing.

As in “this could blind you” and “just one spark and this blows up” and the like.

“Rust Creek” – the title is of course, the setting — settles into a torpid lack of urgency far too early to make this simple plot, with a four big action beats, fly along. Director Jen McGowan has a script with a few good fights and a handful of decent lines. But she dawdles and “Rust Creek” rusts, right before our eyes.

I was more interested in Sawyer showing off her self-sufficiency, peeling off her fake nails and getting down to the business of out hustling, out fighting or outsmarting her inbred pursuers.

“Figure this out! Everything’s going to be fine!”

But no, let’s have a man play her reluctant savior.

The object lessons in such movies — your cell phone won’t save you, etc. — are rung up, only to have the script lean heavily on the next coincidence, the next too-obvious means of escape.

We may instantly identify with the plucky coed, instantly fear and loathe the camo-loving locals and compliant law enforcement. But those are the only time-savers “Rust Creek” employs.

The violent payoffs are well-staged and edited, and the archetypes solid. But McGowan can’t force herself or her cast to just get on with what they know they must get on with. The “Creek” never quite dries up, but we never get to the rapids either.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some drug material

Cast: Hermione Corfield, Jay Paulson, Sean O’Bryan, Denise Dal Vera, Jeremy Glazer, Micah Hauptman

Credits: Directed by Jen McGowan, script by Julie Lipson. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:44

Ola runs young Nikodem through his Catholic Communion drills, prepping him a ceremony she knows this “on the spectrum” kid could mess up.

She goes through his backpack, weeding out everything “you don’t need.”

She calls and chews out the man of the house for being out at the pub. They need a bigger flat, so she’s the one who has to handle the town council paperwork.

And she badgers Magda, her mother, about coming to that Communion, about leaving the man she’s taken up with and had a baby with, and moving back in.

On a rare outing, she gets to feel “normal,” laughing and dancing with her peers. But when she comes home, she weeps at “this pigsty” she lives in, at her overwhelming responsibilities, at the dysfunction all around her.

Ola Kaczanowski is 14 years old.

Filmmaker Anna Zamecka‘s Oscar short list (Oscar eligible, a possible nominee) documentary “Communion” (“Komunia,” in Polish) is a study in resilience in the face of dysfunction, a profile of a child forced to grow up, be the adult, in a house where no one else will take the job.

Her mother Magda ran away, and when we see Ola’s dad, we understand. Maybe the drinking started after she left (Magda is younger and prettier. Maybe it was the final straw. He is an ineffectual lout, collecting public aid, shrugging off every decision, every household job, to Ola.

“Ola can’t take care of Nikodem on her own,” the unseen social worker barks at him (in Polish, with English subtitles). And yet here he is, drinking and smoking at the pub, ducking out on home life.

If that wasn’t enough, Magda’s son Nikodem, Ola’s 13 year-old brother, adds to the picture of “overwhelmed,” another excuse for Mom to run out.

Ola doesn’t have that option. She relentlessly drills the fidgety Nikodem on his Catholicism, teaches him to tie his shoes and battles his constant distraction. We meet him as he’s scolding himself for not putting on his pants properly. He stares at his fingernails — at home, in school and in church. He sees them as “claws.”

Ola chides him for his Communion notes — reading “No Mongols allowed” and “Jesus and the dinosaurs” — passages aloud, in mockery.

“You can’t do such things in religion class.” The kid is one joke-around on the church PA system away from blowing it. At least he’s very good at memorizing, which is what it takes to pass muster with the priest.

Ola lets us see the weight she carries, shrieking at her drunken father for somehow losing their TV, desperately badgering Madga to come home — making reasoned arguments, building her case, making living arrangement promises.

Zamecka’s all-access film means we see Ola’s desperation, and Magda’s resignation. Each one needs a break, and each is counting on the other to give it to her. Seeing Ola with a baby half-brother in her lap is just chilling.

These are the saddest moments of “Communion,” Ola’s tireless, adult efforts to get some sense of a “normal” childhood back, her grown-up-too-fast realization that it’s all come to naught.

Zamecka gives us a home movie glimpse of Ola’s own Communion, years before Magda left, when her life had more promise. Zamecka sprinkles in details — a post-ceremony meal, classes where the priest leads the kids in a “Magdalena Cha Cha Cha” song about Catholicism set to “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

“Communion” isn’t so much a coming-of-age story as a “My hard life begins in childhood” account of a smart, tough and responsible kid having to get tougher and smarter at a very early age. Watch Ola with her classmates, with her family. She’s been forced to be the adult, and that’s turning her into a leader.

That makes her a teen we worry for because we suspect that revisiting her in ten years she could go either way. Will she be worn down by life, with diminished expectations marking her 20s and the rest of her future? Or will she grow up to be a smart woman hardened in childhood for a life of leadership in a country where too many are resigned to sit back and let others do the heavy lifting? “Communion” cries out for a sequel — maybe of her own child’s Communion, decades in the future.

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol consumption, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ola and Nikodem Kaczanowski

Credits: Written and directed by Anna Zamecka.  An HBO Europe/Otter Studios/Wajda Studios/Polish Film Institute release

Running time:  1:12

An honest movie a about a “problem” gambler never blinks. It does not shy away from the ruin addiction can bring to your life, the soul-crushing compromises that come with that addiction, the lies that pile up with every “I promise” made to bookies, friends, lovers and family.

Such a film may give us a taste of the momentary buzz of “getting even.” But it never lets you see that gambler get ahead and stay ahead.

“West of Sunshine” is an Aussie day-in-the-life drama, a father (Damian Hill), kicked out of his house, stuck with child-care responsibilities for a long day of pretty much everything except what he’s supposed to be doing — delivering packages.

But whatever predictable, melodramatic turns this Jason Raftopoulos film takes, it rarely blinks and never gives itself over to the “romance” of gambling and the gambler’s lifestyle.

Jimmy used to be a mechanic. Now he drives for Golden Messenger courier service. He’s a bad courier driver. He couldn’t be on time if his life depended on it.

He’s a bad father. He’s late picking up his rebellious teen Alex (Ty Perham), even though his disapproving not-quite-ex (Faye Smith) expects no less.

There are just a few constants in Jimmy’s life. He’s held on to his father’s 1968 Ford Fairlane ZA (Australian) muscle car. He won’t quit gambling. And he won’t stop lying — about why he’s late (the man lacks urgency in all things), about “Pay you back every cent, promise.”

Every time he says “promise,” to his wife, his son, his work-pal (Arthur Angel) and his former employer and loan shark (Tony Nikolakopoulos) you wince a little.

He’s always “gonna square this whole thing.” And today his plan is, win enough at the horse track to get even. A mop-topped son who has nightmares about “a man coming into my room,” who runs down Jimmy’s phone playing video games and who finds other ways to act out as Jimmy interrupts work for meals, side hustles, trying to palm Alex off on his girlfriend (Eliza D’Souza) doesn’t really figure into those plans.

Jimmy is “in the moment,” he’s got a sure thing in Race #6.

“How do you know?”

“I just KNOW.”

What Jimmy is might better be described as irresponsible, self-absorbed, delusional with just a hint of stupid.

During their day together, he scores cash. Which he keeps just long to brag to one and all (including the indulgent loan shark) before blowing it.

“I was thinking I could win some more.”

“Of course you did.”

He leans on exes and a pal for a loan to save his neck. Using everyone around him is second nature, now.

“I can’t. I can’t.”

So that’s what he’s teaching Alex, how to not plan ahead, how to be careless and self-indulgent in the extreme. Other lessons?

“Can’t stand redheads, mate. One thing you’ll learn.”

A pretty woman crosses the street — “Alex….boobs.”

And on lunch break, the real teachable moment.

“Ever heard of Blackjack?”

Hill and Perham have good chemistry, and I reveled in the way “West of Sunshine” doesn’t so much hit rock bottom as introduce us to a guy already there. He just doesn’t know it. He’s got to wallow in it a while longer to figure it out.

Hill gives Jimmy the odd flash of self-awareness, but he plays this guy as a 40 year-old still re-learning the life lessons of 22.

Actor turned writer-director Raftopoulos doesn’t surprise us here. The characters are variations on character “types,” and the supporting players are hard-pressed to make much of them.

Raftopoulos is content to narrow his story to the last lap or two of Jimmy’s downward spiral, to rummage around rock bottom and let Jimmy figure out what we’ve long ago guessed.

The filmmaker takes on the role of loan shark, in a way. He puts his boot on Jimmy’s neck and keeps it there, and makes entertainment out of us waiting for Jimmy to notice that boot, and figure out how to get it off his neck.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug use, physical violence, profanity

Cast:  Damian Hill,Ty Perham, Kat Stewart, Faye Smith, Eliza D’Souza, Arthur Angel, Tony Nikolakopoulos

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Raftopoulos. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:18

It’s “acting a little strange.” It’s got “a mind of its own.”

It’s got an eye for the ladies.

And it’s out of control. “Man, I HATE upgrades!”

From the creators of “Zombeavers” it’s “The Drone.”

Funny trailer.

It’s the first major release of 2019, so Fox has a bit riding on the trailers for this one. Here’s the British trailer for it. Looks familiar, almost fun.

You want to make a producer’s eyes do the dollar sign dance, make the star of her or his low-budget film a STAR after that indie film has finished shooting.

The folks behind the Brit dramedy “Adult Life Skills” can be excused for thinking they hit the jackpot. A year after their twee little character piece was finished and in the can, its star, Jodie Whittaker, barely-known for work in “Venus” and “Attack the Block” and co-starring in TV’s “Broadchurch,” became the first female Doctor Who.

And you know what they say in the UK. There’s famous, and there’s “She’s the first woman cast as The Doctor” famous.

Whittaker stars as Anna, an under-employed grunt at a seen-better-days outdoor activity “resort” (kayaking, sailing, etc.) in West Yorkshire. The work isn’t fulfilling, so she copes by running a vlog made up of thumb-puppet science fiction mini-movies she preps, shoots, stars in and edits in Shed Zeppelin, or Right Shed Fred — her fortress of solitude back of the garden of mum’s house.

She dozes off there most nights, forgetting to bring a change of clothes, shocking the mailman with her near-nude sprints back to her room to the scolding of her no-longer-indulgent mother (Lorraine Ashburne). Grandma (Eileen Davies) may think she just needs a man, that “You’re not really living right now.”

Mum is more blunt, about the “bloody thumb videos” that her about-to-turn-30 daughter labors over, a woman acting like an immature teen, dressing “like a homeless teenager.”

“You said you’d be OUT by now!”

Leaving Anna printouts of online listicles — articles listing “Things you should stop doing by 30” — isn’t helping.

“I’m not moving out until I’ve worked out what I’m doing!”

Anna is clumsy — the sort who wouldn’t realize that drying an underwire bra in the microwave is a good way to blow up said microwave. She’s clueless about the flattering attentions of her colleague Brendan (Brett Goldstein). Because she just assumes he’s gay.

“Why does everyone think I’m gay? I’ve got a soft voice. And I wore pink shorts — ONCE!”

But the overweening impression this “homeless teenager” pushing 30 leaves is of a woman stuck. She used to do those videos with someone else. That someone else is gone, and she’s lost.

A series of new characters promise to give her a chance to come unstuck. Lively, working class world traveler-pal Alice (Alice Lowe) returns to town, to Wilburwood Outdoor Pursuits Center. She notices Brendan’s attentions and tries to kick start Anna towards…something.

Mum is determined to move Anna into an apartment. Brendan’s other gig happens to be as a rental property agent.

And a little boy given the unlikely name “Clint” (Ozzy Myers) moves in next door. He dresses up as a cowboy, just like Anna’s missing co-conspirator on the videos. And his mother is very, very sick.

Plow through the thick-thicker-thickest Yorkshire accents and “Adult Life Skills” and Whittaker have an undeniable charm. Tragedy broke Anna, and Whittaker gets across that she was fragile to start with. She doesn’t have a lot to offer, but eager-to-please Brendan sees something and wants to give her credit for what she does know — DIY video special effects, wit, her ability to pull off “cute” as rumpled and despairing as she seems most of the time.

Brendan suggests that the world should hand out “merit badges,” like the ones teenage Girl and Boy Scouts get — for “Adult Life Skills.” Anna’s got just enough of those to be of use to a sad, odd little boy who is facing something not unlike the crushing event that broke Anna.

She still sees her former partner in crime (Edward Hogg), still has conversations with him. They used to debate the thesis that “All teddy bears are nihilists.” Not that such discussions, then or now, help her get unstuck.

Whittaker gives Anna a quirky vulnerability that suits editor-turned writer-director Rachel Tunnard’s needs, here. There’s a lovely humanity to all the characters, who are funny enough, but never broad enough to be caricatures.

Three generations of women under the same roof creates comedy.

“I can’t believe you’re my MOTHER.”

“LET’s get a BLOODtest!”

But you feel love and concern in both older women’s view of Anna. It’s there in her friends and indulgent colleagues, too. She’s not good at much, but going through what she’s been through means we won’t be sacking her just now.

The main reason people check this out will be Whittaker’s new role as Doctor Who. And she doesn’t disappoint. She gives this walking-wounded woman a hint of the coquette she never realized she was, a smartness informed by sadness and — with a little boy she’s utterly ill-qualified to baby sit, much less mentor — a purpose.

We don’t get merit badges for having “Adult Life Skills,” being able to feed, clothe and house ourselves, eat with chopsticks or balance a bank account. But Whittaker’s Anna makes the case that maybe Brendan’s right. Maybe we should. Sometimes, we all reach that low point where we could use a win, any win — credit for managing just well enough to get by.

That goes for the movie about her, too.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashburne, Alice Lowe, Rachel Deering, Brett Goldstein, Edward Hogg

Credits: Written and directed by Rachel Tunnard.  A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:36

There’s a sense of “Left Behind” in writer-director Jason Noto’s “Beyond the Night.”

It’s not about “The Rapture,” like those Christian novels and the films based on them, but about those corners of rural America which many have fled. Those “left behind” there have history. But along with that can come clannishness in which blood matters more than justice, old grudges can trump present grievances. 

Because everybody there is either related to or socially connected to everybody else.  

Noto illustrates this with a gritty rural thriller, a “Winter’s Bone” without the meth, but with a supernatural twist, a tale set in a backward town where you see the same half dozen surnames attached to every mailbox. 

Zane Holtz of “Hunter Killer” is Ray Marrow, an infantryman we meet as he dashes to his dying wife’s bedside. Maisie was in a car wreck, and Ray has to come home to see to her arrangements and take care of their odd, birth-marked little boy.

Lawrence, beautifully played by without fuss or affectation by Azhy Robertson of “Juliet, Naked,” is unfiltered, unrestrained and young enough to be confused by his mother’s death. Or maybe he’s like this all the time. He acts up at in church, at the funeral, mouths off at the visitation, but not — oddly — at the coroner’s inquest, which his father (who delivered the body, in person) has dragged him along to.

Whatever’s going on with Lawrence, Ray’s bad-parenting isn’t going to help it. The kid needs counseling, therapy and understanding. Ray doesn’t want that, because he’s sure his violent past and present (he IS in the military, after all) is the reason for Lawrence’s anti-social awkwardness.

“I think that I’ve cursed my son because of it.”

They take Maisie home to the mountains (Sullivan County, New York) to bury her. It was a place she and Ray fled, which Lawrence has never known. But the odd kid seems oddly at home there. He knows things. And when he blurts out the name of a long-missing teen whom he could never have met, ears perk up.

July Rain Coleman was a cheerleader who disappeared years ago. She came from a violent, sketchy family. And her dad, Bernie (veteran character actor Chance Kelly) is every aged redneck thug you ever crossed the street to avoid.

He’s never gotten over his daughter’s disappearance and figures the town, which wasn’t all that sympathetic, is hiding something and owes him answers.

Little Lawrence, seemingly channeling some font of knowledge about July Rain and what might have happened to her, instantly has his interest. 

“I don’t always get to practice non-violence,” he growls at the shrink (Enid Graham of “Boardwalk Empire”) a concerned Ray allows Lawrence to see. Bernie wants access to the kid, and Bernie’s a dangerous man to cross, or even to give in to.

There’s a supportive pastor (Neal Huff) and Ray’s sheriff’s deputy sister (veteran character actress Tammy Blanchard of “Into the Woods,” etc.) hoping to help out.

Maisie’s parents (Beth Glover, Sherman Howard) and the sheriff (Skipp Sudduth) fret over what all this fresh attention to a “cold case” will do to the town.

Noto takes care to keep the tension high and the drama safely on this side of “melodrama.” Religion is treated matter-of-factly, as simply a part of life there. There’s just enough disbelief in what might be going on with Lawrence to keep the story credible. This is one of those cases where “There must be some sort of logical explanation for this” goes out the window.

“Boy’s got the Devil in him!”

But even though the plot gets mired in lapses of logic in the third act, Noto never lets that hang up his movie. 

It’s a well-cast and very well-acted film. Holtz has hints of bluff, blunt Michael Shannon in his father role. I love the way he plays Ray’s instincts about the kid, putting himself between his boy and potential danger, such as that first time Bernie and his “band of degenerates” wants a word with Lawrence.

“You’re good, right there,” is all Ray has to say.

He’s the sort of dad who comforts his boy after a tactless girl mockingly snaps a picture of him, and the sort who would go overboard defending his son from the bullying that a facial birthmark earns him at that age.

Young Robertson has a moment that will break your heart.

But this is Kelly’s picture, playing a simmering vortex of resentment and hurt, a man who has spent his life making threats, leaning on violence to get what he wants — and has paid a price for it. He’s no mustache-twirling villain. He’s a hard man not smart enough to have ever avoided a bad decision, not smart enough to have left, but someone with a point of view and the myopia to get what he wants, damn the consequences. 

Like everyone else in this modest, far-fetched but earthy drama, Kelly keeps this creep’s boots planted firmly in the mud of the cold, Catskills ground. 

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity 

Cast: Zane Holtz, Azhy Robertson, Tammy Blanchard, Chance Kelly, Neal Huff, Enid Graham

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Noto.  A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:38

Warner Brothers is awash in cash this last weekend of 2018, as “Aquaman,” its latest DC comics blockbuster, tallies another $50 million+ and closes in on $200 since release ($188-190s by New Year’s).

That’s on a par with WB’s “Wonder Woman,” and we all know how that turned out.

Jason Momoa’s TV and B-movie days are behind him. For good.

“Vice” is in wide release, and if the Oscar buzz is fading a bit (not for Bale, Adams), it looks to stay in the top ten until the New Year is well under way. Over $8 million this weekend for Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney take-down.

“On the Basis of Sex” is only on 33 screens, and a little Oscar bump could help that Ruth Bader Ginsburg bio-pic crack the top ten in wider release.

As things stand now, “Mary Queen of Scots” is besting “The Favourite” among the Brit period pieces competing for the prestige picture box office.

“Spider-Verse” will have cleared $100 million by New Year’s. I’m also intrigued to see Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule” sticking around. No awards buzz around it, Clint’s audience is quite old at this point and slow to get out to see his latest, but the cute but dark departure for the Grand Old Man of Cinema is passing $60 million this weekend.

“Bumblebee” isn’t fading as fast as its weak opening would have suggested. But “Mary Poppins Returns” is doing what good musicals do — adding audience and gaining steam. It will have cleared $102 million on its second weekend, with six to eight weeks of momentum ahead of it.