Don’t let your kids go alone

It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that my own offspring loves to watch horror movies. She doesn’t get scared very easily, either. Turns out, the ones that kinda freak her out are the ones with little kids.

Well, I remembered this movie.

It’s honestly kinda freaky and gross. The entire thing is shot documentary style, but the documentarians are the two kids. Their mom – the hilarious Kathryn Hahn – ships them off to her estranged parents’ house. The grandparents found them on the internet and reached out. So mom lets the two take the train, alone.

To which my kid asked, “she’s letting them go alone?”

Yeah, she is. Problem #1.

You meet the grandparents, and you already know something is wrong. They’re very, very strange. In an old-person way, yes; but more than that. They have a supernatural quality about them. Nana projectile vomits at night and crawls around on all fours under the house during the day. Pop Pop puts his dirty adult diapers in the shed.

The kids try to tell their mom, who excuses their weirdness for their age. But it’s more than that. Pop Pop tries to beat a dude up on the street. Nana tries to off herself.

Now, this is an M. Night Shyamalan movie, and as such. You know there’s a twist.

It comes when the kids are video chatting with their mom. They show her the grandparents outside, and the mom tells them:

Those aren’t your grandparents.

Nope, they’re not. Their real grandparents are stuffed in a cement cubby in the basement. These two are impostors, asylum patients who broke out and commandeered the lives of their real grandparents. Then more weird shit happens with diapers and shards of glass, and yeah.

It’s one of those movies I don’t really need to watch more than once (unless it’s to pass onto my kids, I guess).