A seven-year-old girl wakes up in a cornfield with a nasty gash on the head and missing one Winnie-the-Pooh wellington boot. This simple premise is the seedling from which Seth Daly’s The Rows is cross-bred, combining the brutal home (or field) invasion of The Strangers with the creepy supernatural scares of… well, what is a Moon Man supposed to be anyway?
Spread across three non-linear chapters, this glacial horror film follows Lucy’s (Brindisi Capri) fight for survival as she’s pursued by a gang of masked home invaders, each determined to silence the girl who saw too much. She’s not alone though, and Lucy is assisted in the fight by her trusty pooch (the goodest dog in a horror film since The Hills Have Eyes) and mysterious cornfield entity Moon Man (Douglas Fries). It’s a sparse narrative, and writer-director Daly chooses not to explain much more than that.
When it does go into detail, The Rows lets events unfold out of sequence, waiting until the second chapter to fill audiences in on who these men are (ish) and why they are there (again, ish). Unfortunately, as this second act doesn’t subvert anything we thought we knew from the first, precious little of value is learned – even if its takes on home invasion tropes are particularly jittersome. Capri weathers the ordeal like a champ, but the decision to have her barely react to anything only serves to make the film feel more cold and distant than it already is. Between the faceless killers and Lucy’s perpetual frown in a cornfield, it’s the dog who gives the film its best (or at least most emotive) performance.
Where The Rows does excel is in its gorgeous cinematography, with Corey Weintraub making the most of the claustrophobic cornfield setting. As night settles, Daly continually finds ways to wring fresh tension from Lucy’s situation, utilising all manner of farming equipment, stolen weapons and perhaps a few too many instances of Deus Ex Dog Rescue. And then there’s Moon Man, who briefly sends the film into Pan’s Labyrinth, but ultimately brings little to the narrative beyond an incredible creature design and another unexplained mystery. On the other hand, he brings an incredible creature design and another unexplained mystery to the narrative, so its hard to begrudge the film its most striking feature.
The Row’s kernels of brilliance make it all the more frustrating, obscuring a genuinely tense Cornfield Invasion movie behind something deliberately obtuse and alien.
THE ROWS premiered at UK FrightFest on August 25, 2025.
