The Puppetman review
Shudder’s spooky season continues with The Puppetman. A movie with a great idea that in unleashes far too infrequently.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Puppetman
Directed by Brandon Christiansen
Written by Brandon and Ryan Christiansen
Starring Michael Paré, Alyson Gorske, Caryn Richman, Jayson Therrien, Angel Prater, Anna Telfer, Kio Cyr and Zachary Le Vey
The Puppetman Review
When a great premise fails to live up to its potential it leaves you feeling underwhelmed. Such is the case with the new Shudder release The Puppetman. You have to give it credit for its good ideas…but can’t shake off wishing it had done so much more with them. That’s not to say that The Puppetman is a bad movie. On the contrary, it is a well-made, original story that hits great heights when it chooses to play in the sandbox it spends oh so long building. It just doesn’t rise to those heights often enough to justify all the time spent with its feet planted firmly on the ground.
The movie opens with an intriguing scene. A man kills his wife while seemingly under the influence of an unseen entity. He claims to have not been in control of his own body when the murder transpired. But this story isn’t about him. It’s about his daughter. A little girl that he keeps locked in a cage inside of a closet. We reconnect with a now grown Michal (Alyson Gorske) forced to relive that trauma as her father’s death sentence approaches.
Michal is, understandably, a bit of a loner. Her roommate Charlie (Angel Prater) is her main connection to the outside world. Michal has difficulty ingratiating herself into Charlie’s friend group. They mostly seem tolerant at best to her inclusion. The Puppetman presents one candidate among them as a possible love interest for a willing Michal…but the nature of her situation makes even that relationship feel cold and forced. That’s not a complaint. The little touches that The Puppetman layers into present Michal’s awkwardness are appreciated. She wants to have those personal connections…she simply struggles to have them.
Her situation, we learn, is much more complex than her childhood trauma. Her father has always maintained his innocence. Offering up the Shaggy Defense in all its glory. Caught me killing my wife in the kitchen. … It wasn’t me. His claim that someone else was in control of his body at the time gains traction with Michal when Charlie walks herself right off a rooftop in front of everyone. Something is controlling people. The Puppetman spends a lot of time discussing what that is and where it came from.
It’s the biggest issue with the movie. Had this been a simple story of an unexplainable entity making people kill themselves…we’d have had a true-blue spooky season success. Instead, The Puppetman thinks the origin of the entity and its connection to Michal is the worthier part. The movie is wrong. It proves itself wrong every time we see the entity in action. There are some truly inspired moments in The Puppetman. All of them surround the idea of someone not in control of themselves. None of them involve the backstory of Michal, her father, or why this is happening.
Now…I can already hear you on this. Story is important…cheap thrills can’t be the whole point…we all want a full-fledged movie and not a bag of tricks. I agree. That’s why I made sure to begin this review by acknowledging that The Puppetman is not a bad movie. It’s a fine one. It’s also dragged down by a slow pace and the reveal of backstory that you are unlikely to care about. When it flexes its body control ideas…the movie works at a high level. Something it needed to do a lot more of to make up for the lulls and tedium that carry most of the proceedings.
We could dive further into the slow start of The Puppetman or how it chooses to involve a psychic, and something called the Cult of Dolos…but I think that sentence pretty much tells its own story. It would be a lot more fun to discuss the moments that make the movie worth watching. When The Puppetman wants to turn the screws on its central conceit…it does so with style and flourish.
No one is safe from a sudden case of bodily possession. The death scenes here are pure fun. It doesn’t stop there. For reasons explained in the boring parts of the movie we aren’t talking about anymore…Michal is being protected by the entity. She is the epicenter of all the death and pain in the story. Knowing that she chooses to remove herself from it. But she can’t. Large scale possessions in traffic and during a memorable police station encounter are even better than the unexpected death scenes.
The Puppetman is recommended for those fun moments that break apart a mostly monotonous story. The reason this is happening is a decent one on paper. The full exploration into it, however, isn’t worth the time the movie commits to it. What is worth it…is a well-made original story with a decent cast and moments of pure entertainment. If The Puppetman had chosen to chase those highs instead of drowning itself in the minutia of explaining them…it could have been so much more. Almost.
Scare Value
The Puppetman teases you with a good time. When it wants to deliver on the fun premise…it delivers big. Those moments are far too sparse given how exciting it all could have been. It gets close to breaking through…but reverts back to a slower approach when it should ramp itself up. What’s here is fine…but it doesn’t surpass that level often enough to be anything more than that.
2.5/5
The Puppetman Link
Streaming on Shudder
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