‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ Review: Aimless Dystopian Horror
I recently watched the Tubi original horror film Please Don’t Feed the Children, and I have so many thoughts about where it went wrong. I went in with high expectations, knowing that Destry Allyn Spielberg sits at the helm. Yet, I came away wanting a lot more from the legacy filmmaker’s feature-length debut. This apocalyptic tale of a cannibalistic virus starts out like it might have something to say about how society frequently points fingers and looks for scapegoats in the face of the unknown. But, there’s so much left on the table when all is said and done. The messaging reads as muddled; the tension is rarely sustained; and the narrative is predictable throughout. Not a great combination.
The film unfolds in a dystopian reality where a nasty viral outbreak has claimed countless adult lives, a dynamic that ultimately sees children coming under suspicion as carriers of the disease. Matters quickly grow so dire that kids aren’t allowed in public without an adult escort. Amidst all this, we catch up with Mary (Zoe Colletti), an orphan on the run, as she attempts to evade detection at a bus station. Shortly before she’s discovered by law enforcement, Mary meets Jeffy (Dean Scott Vazquez), a fellow orphan who belongs to a group of unsupervised minors who’ve banded together like a makeshift family.
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Jeffy helps Mary escape in the nick of time, but the close call brings the heat down, forcing Mary and the crew she only recently met to make a run for it. The group later takes refuge with a seemingly compassionate woman called Clara (Michelle Dockery), but the youngsters quickly learn that there’s more to her than meets the eye.
There’s a promising setup in there somewhere, but Paul Bertino’s screenplay rarely takes risks or eschews convention. As such, predictability quickly sets in, giving the viewer little to do aside from pick apart the film’s flaws.
The astute viewer will find plenty of flaws to choose from, not the least of which is the pacing. The setup establishes a certain amount of tension at the onset, but once the children wind up in Clara’s “care,” the proceedings quickly grind to a halt. From there, the narrative splits the perspective between Mary and her newfound friends, jumping to and fro with little rhyme or reason.
After the momentum dies, we learn that Clara’s daughter was among the unlucky fraction of children susceptible to the harmful effects of the virus. Because of that traumatic ordeal, Clara is especially vulnerable to young Mary’s arrival. She ultimately develops designs on taking Mary in as a surrogate for the child she lost.
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After Clara is introduced, the narrative vacillates between Mary and Clara’s toxic dynamic and the rest of the group, who are imprisoned upstairs. When the orphan gang re-enters the picture, in brief stints that add little to the proceedings, it feels almost incidental, which likely does little to endear the supporting characters to the audience. None of these secondary players is particularly well-developed, so these extended absences only further the distinction that they are largely superfluous. If Bertino had scaled back and centered the proceedings around Mary as a lone orphan on the run, I think this setup might have worked more effectively. As it stands, there are so many people in the mix that it’s difficult to find the time to invest in any of them, even Mary.
Although Mary is decidedly the lead character, even she is woefully underdeveloped. Her only defining characteristic is that she tragically lost her sister prior to the point where we catch up with her. Aside from that, we know almost nothing about her. We miss out on the chance to get to know Mary as an individual because she joins forces with the ragtag gang of misfit orphans almost immediately after we make her acquaintance, and therefore has little time to establish herself.
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Even though Dockery’s Clara is a compelling antagonist with a gut-wrenching backstory, she’s certainly not an antihero, meaning that there is ultimately no one to invest in here. The lack of an anchor makes the proceedings feel almost like an existential meditation on, well, I don’t even know. None of the themes is well-developed enough to really resonate. I fully expected to see more commentary on the knee-jerk reaction to children being labeled as potential carriers and thus cast aside by society, but that element is never explored with the kind of nuance it warrants. With so much left on the table, the entire presentation often feels muddled and aimless.
With all that said, Please Don’t Feed the Children is perfectly serviceable on a technical level, and the cinematography and editing are competently rendered with no obvious blunders to be found. Yet, the lack of a compelling narrative or any characters that resonate kept me from ever really investing, let alone enjoying the film.
While Please Don’t Feed the Children isn’t a complete disaster, it’s far from a must-see. The characters don’t really make an impact, the narrative is overstuffed, and the most interesting themes are never explored in any detail. If you feel the urge to experience the flick so you can draw your own conclusions, you can watch it on Tubi.
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Please Don’t Feed the Children
Summary
‘Please Don’t Feed the Children’ is a rudderless effort that never gets around to properly addressing its most compelling themes.
Categorized: Reviews
