'The Djinn' film review: Stale wish fulfillment gone wrong fable underwhelms
A handicapped boy meddles with demonic forces in yet another "be careful what you wish for" cautionary tale in the supernatural horror 'The Djinn' (in theaters and on demand May 14).
In short: Dylan (Ezra Dewey), a mute boy, is trapped in his apartment with a sinister monster when he makes a wish to fulfill his heart's greatest desire. Rob Brownstein and Tevy Poe also star.
The basic conceit of 'The Djinn' is: innocent kid makes a well-meaning wish and unexpectedly must grapple with some malevolent force alone and unable to escape his apartment. Dylan's father works overnights, leaving young Dylan alone in their new, sparsely furnished apartment alone. It's painfully clear the script was reverse engineered from this basic idea - coming up with the narrative structure first, and backfilling the story with character detail second. This priority of convention over character bleeds through 'The Djinn' from start to finish.
While the basic concept of "kid trapped with some sort of monster in an apartment" might sound great on paper, 'The Djinn' is yet another feature-length film that would probably have worked better as a short film. There's simply not enough story here to justify even its meager 82-minute runtime (the credits start to roll after just 1 hour and 16 minutes). This isn't some sprawling townhouse - this is a modest two-bedroom apartment. It's obvious the filmmakers struggled with this self-inflicted limitation as the script awkwardly draws out "scary" moments to pad the runtime.
Sadly, 'The Djinn' relies on virtually every tired horror movie trope in the book to achieve "scary movie" street cred. Jump scares: check. Creepy images seen in reflections: check. Out-of-focus monster just hiding around a corner: check. The fact that this movie's inciting incident is an arch and arcane ritual isn't subtle or original. And whenever Dylan must stealthily creep around the monster, he can reliably be counted upon make noise at precisely the perfectly ill-timed moment.
Then there's the titular being itself, the Djinn. The best decision this film makes is just throwing Dylan into the fray with the Djinn, because at least the audience is as confused about what's going as Dylan while he's suddenly confronted with the beast. Yet, once the film lazily just drops some exposition on the audience, the Djinn is confusingly all-powerful yet vaguely vulnerable. Even its basic motivation is pretty muddy. And it's not like Dylan is a richly developed character. So the film is basically just "vaguely powerful supernatural monster stalks a child who just doesn't want to die."
Final verdict: Light on plot and driven by two thin characters, 'The Djinn' relies too heavily on easy horror tropes to string along the audience until it quite literally limps to an uninspired conclusion.
Score: 2/5
'The Djinn' opens in theaters and on demand May 14. This supernatural horror is rated R for some disturbing violence and has a running time of 82 minutes.
