“Cobweb” is a child’s-eye view fright film with a mature, assured style.

The feature-directing debut of French TV veteran Samuel Bodin, this grubby yet elegantly composed thriller evolves from a bumps-in-the-night, creepy-house premise to a reverse-engineered “Babadook” freakout to something like the 1990s Japanese hair horrors (“Ring,” “Dark Water”) of the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, despite all those influences, the film is always its own weird self.

The pace is deliberate for the longest time as we wonder whether 8-year-old Peter (Woody Norman, “C’mon C’mon”) is really hearing a little girl’s voice in his bedroom walls at night or just has an overactive imagination. His mom, Carol (Lizzy Caplan), and dad Mark (Antony Starr) keep telling him it’s the latter, or maybe rodents; Mark lays out cinnamon-scented rat poison just in case.

在学校被欺负,只有相关的子stitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman from “Dopesick” and “Infinity Pool”) as something like a friend, Peter has every reason to feel uncomfortable at home too. It’s like living in a run-down “Addams Family” house if Morticia and Gomez weren’t any fun.

From Peter’s perspective, his mom always seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, while Dad locks him in the (haunted?) basement for punishment and “his own good.” Maybe they’re just overconcerned involved parents, but that hardly matters when they won’t let Peter trick-or-treat. That’s just cruel, even if, as they tell their son, it’s because a girl from down the block disappeared one Halloween before he was born. Could her ghost be the disembodied voice that keeps telling him the adults are awful and encourages him to push back on his classroom tormentors?

While Norman’s Peter remains admirably self-contained through much of this, the adults chew into their parental dementia like starving wall rats. Starr actually comes off warmer than he does as psychotic superhero Homelander in “The Boys”; his Mark might be an unintentionally toxic patriarch who genuinely believes he’s more loving than tough. Regardless, he always seems threatening, even when he’s trying to be ingratiating. Walking around wielding a hammer with an unexplained gash on his forearm doesn’t set a sense of ease.

For her part, Caplan seems to have decided that the “Misery” prequel “Castle Rock” and “Fatal Attraction“重新启动只是排练玩卡罗。Her character’s unhinged jitters almost reach the Isabelle Adjani “Possession” level. This is a mannered madwoman performance — even the cupcakes she bakes are crazy — that will be an acquired taste for some and never digested by others. But it’s so bold and committed, it demands to be admired.

And Caplan more than any other element of the film sets the tone for the third act, a half-hour of sustained, gore-ific horror that leaves us feeling as drained as the leaking corpses that steadily pile up.

There are secret passages and spiders and a rotting pumpkin patch before the monstrousness manifests, all presented in a painterly manner that’s as unnerving as it is symmetrical (cinematographer Philip Lozano seems to think he’s Rembrandt, and he may be right). But once it gets down to business, “Cobweb” is the rare horror movie that makes a happy marriage out of formal beauty and shrieking ghastliness.

Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching “Cobweb,” you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer.