Noddyfan48

First off I wanna say I found this movie on tubi and it covers a very heavy and disturbing topic that deeply troubles me so I was worried going in. I think the characters are very good, the mother, and teacher and little boy are all great characters who I cared about. And I don't think the plot is bad at all at least in the beginning, however once the teacher started using facilitated communication the plot kind of lost me a bit. My main issue with the film is I don't think its plausible. What I mean is, the child is portrayed as severely autistic to the point where he cannot communicate and the film shows that the boy has a severe learning disability. In the beginning he can't even spell or seem to read. A regular child who is getting groomed is not going to understand what is happening to them is wrong, much less a child with a severe learning disability so that part just didn't feel realistic to me. How would he even understand what happened to him or know it was bad? I felt the plot would have been more realistic if the boy had been older at least where he could understand the concept of what happened. Secondly even if the child knew what happened was wrong, I don't believe the jury would believe him because he isn't able to really communicate properly. I feel the beginning and middle are good but the ending just feels incredibly contrived. I get the film makers probably wanted a feel good ending but in terms of the way the child is portrayed and his circumstances the ending just isn't realistic, and because of that I couldn't fully enjoy this movie. All that being said it is a decent film and the boy playing the character Michael did a amazing job, I would've really believed he was autistic.

I stumbled across this movie on Tubi and I was already not expecting much going in. Right off the bat I've seen people compare this movie to the Chronicle's of Narnia, it is not a rip off in my opinion. First off I want to say that this movie is low budget, now low budget doesn't mean bad if the writing is good. The plot is messy and gets pretty contrived and lazy towards the end. The story starts off ok, I actually think the premise is pretty good. The shadow people and their world, the evil witch and the crown are all interesting. Even the little boy I found myself thinking he was a good character and his adventures with the shadow people were interesting, however the plot starts to fall apart when you can tell the writers needed a bigger budget and couldn't pull off the scenes they wanted so they just got lazy with the plot, resolving conflict in a very cheap and anticlimactic way. The third act of the movie just isn't very good. The themes were kind of unclear towards the end. Moving onto music, it was alright I guess? The audio is very strange in this movie because the people are literally whispering. I do like the witch's design and makeup very nice. All together While I was decently entertained in the beginning and middle of the movie I was losing interest towards the end and was kind of bored. It is watchable but there is a lot better out there.