Panic Fest 2025 Coverage
Lead Belly review
Children of divorce beware. One of us made a horror movie.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Lead Belly
Directed by Stephen Simmons
Written by Stephen Simmons
Starring Danny James, Emily Ashby, Bastian Carrasco Betemps, Liam Foehl, Tara Bennett, Derek Boone and Jamie Lynn Bolton
Lead Belly Review
The word “triggered” is one of those things that has been misappropriated by sociopaths to mock people with empathy. “Oh, did I trigger you?” they’ll say like the goons that they are after their unfunny joke about your childhood trauma lands exactly as it would to anyone with a soul. Like most pieces of language these insecure man-babies attempt to turn into insults…it has a simple meaning that flies above their level of understanding. Triggered simply means that something has unlocked an emotional reaction based on an event or events from your past. Hilarious basis for a sick burn, right? An uncontrollable response that human beings have to negative stimuli. Funny stuff.
Lead Belly triggered something in me. It wasn’t a visceral reaction to the dark turn the story takes. It wasn’t a perverse sadness or anger over the way characters treated one another. No…what Lead Belly brought to the surface for me is something that may feel familiar to any child of divorce whose parents both attempted to stay in their lives. Namely, the indescribably strange feeling of staying at the house of the parent you don’t live with most of the time. If you’re parents are still together…you probably won’t understand why that could trigger an emotional response in someone. If you ever spent a week or two in the absentee parent’s house…feeling like you don’t fit into the life of the person who didn’t stick around…you probably just thought, “oh…yeah”.
It’s (hopefully) not an end of the world feeling. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that buried feeling. Maybe you grew up and have fostered a healthy relationship with all sides of the family. But it might still be there. That feeling of being a stranger in a place you shouldn’t. Lead Belly is dripping with that feeling. At least…for viewers already familiar with it. Writer/director Stephen Simmons clearly is. I’ve never seen a film capture this specific oddity as completely as Lead Belly does.
The story involves brothers Marcus (Liam Foehl) and Kyle (Bastian Carrasco Betemps) and their prolonged visit to their father Michael’s (Danny James) home. Michael is…not very good at the whole fatherhood thing. He tries…sometimes. Even those efforts feel forced and somehow off. The kids can’t get comfortable in the home. Micheal’s penchant for forgetting to feed them and prioritizing his social life over their needs certainly doesn’t help. Danny James is terrific as the father here. He oscillates between oddly likable dad energy to angry cluelessness with ease. The first hour or so of Lead Belly is comprised of nothing more than the odd relationship and strange feeling of living with a near stranger who shares your blood.
Things grow increasingly weird in the final act of Lead Belly. There’s a reveal that changes our perspective on Michael’s role in the story. A few flashbacks answer some questions you may or may not have had. What makes Lead Belly tick, however, is the authentic feeling it creates around its setting. Nothing has to be wrong for Lead Belly to work. That feeling is more than enough. Something is wrong, of course. Lead Belly gets much darker than a buried feeling of insecurity around an absentee parent. In fact, what’s happening outside of the home ends up being more important than what is happening inside of it for a while. The perspective switch changes a lot about Lead Belly and threatens to break the trance it expertly crafts for people with similar memories.
What happens inside the house returns to center stage for the dark finale of Lead Belly. It’s a movie that features some great performances, a dark yet realistic twist, and a boldly bleak final image. Yet its finest accomplishment is the pervading feeling it evokes. A feeling that the narrative occasionally, unintentionally threatens to undermine. Simmons certainly understands what he’s done in creating it. It comes from a very real place that is clearly well known to him. It makes Lead Belly a fascinating experience regardless of what the story does with it.
Scare Value
Lead Belly gets incredibly dark in its final act. In retrospect, it wasn’t bathed in light to begin with. If you are a child of divorce and have spent uncomfortable weeks (or longer) in the care of the parent who left…Lead Belly might hit very close to the home that never felt like yours. Then writer/director Stephen Simmons turns it into a full-on nightmare whose realism is far scarier than whatever you might think is lurking in the dark.
