This new oddball thriller (aka Baby Monitor), written, directed by and starring Ryan Barton-Grimley, opens with a clever piece of misdirection that spins the narrative in a quite unexpected direction. What follows is an intense and unsettling night in the company of an anxious father searching for his kidnapped child whose grip on reality appears to be breaking down.
While his wife Allie enjoys a well-deserved evening off, husband Andy is left home alone looking after their young baby. When he responds to the restless infant’s cries, he finds the crib empty and a disembodied child snatcher’s voice threatening him through the baby monitor. Panicking and desperate, Andy sets off into the night to draw together the kidnappers’ ransom from a series of bank ATMs. But what he encounters becomes increasingly strange and inexplicable. As the timeline of his evening becomes a jumble of out-of-sequence events and nightmares bleed into and merge with his conscious thoughts, his fate and that of his child appear sealed.
A formulaic crime caper would have used the wireless baby monitor as a straightforward conduit between villain and victim as the clock ticked down to the kidnappers’ deadline. But Barton-Grimley uses the disembodied voice as the means to plunge Andy into a series of weird late-night adventures in the backstreets of his hometown that may be figments of his stressed-out imagination. It’s an entertaining flight of fancy. What weakens the impact is that the fractured narrative – which continually resets the story – ends up leaving everything feeling arbitrary and inconsequential. This makes it harder to care about which of the events that Andy experiences on that fateful night really happened.
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