So,
you live in a house bordering a wild and brambly woods? Seriously, why don’t
you say your final goodbyes to your kids while you still have time. After all,
you know full well you will find that forest has a history of child
disappearances if you do five minutes of googling. Samantha’s sort of sister
Olivia was abducted in such a forest and replaced by an evil doppelganger, but
nobody will believe her, because she is the obnoxious foster child in Jeremy
Lutter’s The Hollow Child (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Portland Film Festival.
Samantha
has issues, but Garrett and Liz still welcomed her into their home. Little Olivia
idolizes her, but Samantha is always ditching the eight-ish-year-old, to smoke
and drink with her orphanage pal, Emily. She really should have been looking
after her when Olivia vanished—a fact not lost on her foster father. Yet, just
as her guilt becomes unbearable, Olivia reappears—except this isn’t really
Olivia. It is an impostor, who enjoys ripping the eyes off her stuffed animals.
Of
course, Liz and Garrett are too dense to recognize her ominous behavior. Plus,
the forest spirit has a talent making Samantha look bad. However, the moody
teen will possibly glean some survival tips from Alison, the town nutcase, who
went through a very similar ordeal several years ago.
As
horror movies go, Hollow Child is
pretty non-descript. Frankly, it feels it could have been produced as a
Lifetime Movie Network original. You have a child in jeopardy and the young
heroine nobody believes. Frustratingly, it also features the all-too-common “screw-you”
horror movie ending. Seriously, it is a minor miracle that we care about these
characters to any extent, so it is a real buzzkill when Lutter and screenwriter
Ben Rollo drop a load of dirt on them during the closing seconds.
On
the plus side, there is some realistically engaging pseudo-chemistry shared by Samantha
and Logan, the nebbish classmate she’s just not into. Jessica McLeod and Connor
Stanhope play off each other nicely and they both can actually pass for older
teens. Young Hannah Cheramy also chews the scenery like a seasoned horror genre
performer as impostor Olivia.