Plot
A nurse taking care of her daughter's mysterious affliction struggles to hide her secrets when uninvited strangers take shelter in her house during a lethal blizzard.
Cast
Created by a first time writer and starring the always excellent Annalise Basso and Chrissy Metz! I was excited to see these two and what they'd bring to the table here.
Verdict
I'll be honest when I looked at the cast list I was quite surprised to see Annalise Basso, she's an actress I always thought was on the rise and yet this suggests perhaps I was mistaken and she's rather gone the route of AnnaSophia Robb.
A Creature Was Stirring immediately hits you with fantastic style, a claustrophobic feel, great tension and solid performances. It then adds two additional characters who despite being bland are unable to bring the quality down, then it gradually all begins to go terribly wrong.
It delves into the usual tropes and cliches, some writing decisions become rather head scratching, the religious rhetoric becomes tiresome and then it hits you with a frantic finale with another trope and one that I'm so very very very very stupidly sick of. It's seems like an "Out" for writers when they don't have any ideas how to end the thing and it has the habit of outright killing the entire film.
Had they come up with a better finale this could have actually been an unexpectedly great film, alas it didn't.
Rants
If you don't have the budget to create a monster, don't do a monster movie. It's that simple! I'm all for the logic of keeping it in the shadows to save money but even that needs to be done correctly, look at Alien and Aliens for example! Here they do a combination of keeping it in the shadows in a poor manner and trying to present it but making it looking decidedly awful in the process. If you don't have the money to pull something off, don't try.
The Good
Annalise Basso and Chrissy Metz
Brilliant style
Some decent ideas
The Bad
Scout Taylor-Compton and Connor Paolo were mediocre
Falls apart the further in it goes
Poor finale.
