It Feeds

With films like The Oak Room and Vicious Fun already under his belt, Chad Archibald has demonstrated that he knows how to tell a tale – how to take hold of audience attention and maintain his grip no matter where the story wanders. It Feeds is arguably his most conventional film to date, but it still exercises that grip, and familiar ideas take on a more sinister quality as it develops.

Part of this is down to the sound design. The opening sequence is a full on auditory assault. We are used to sounds like these in horror films, intended to convey stress or fear, but not this loudly or persistently – at least not in the hands of a director who knows what he’s doing. Uncomfortable as it is, this device serves a purpose. We need to understand, and quickly, what heroine Cynthia (Ashley Greene) puts herself through each time she goes inside the mind of one of her clients. She can help people by doing this, but it’s a nightmare for her as it is for them – and, it’s suggested, potentially dangerous.

A qualified psychiatrist, Cynthia operates a small private practice with the aid of her daughter Jordan (Ellie O’Brien). Jordan’s father is no longer around. he had the gift, too, and the implication is that he got in too deep, with fatal consequences. Cynthia is very careful about boundaries. The pair have been run out of town at least once before by people who essentially perceived them as witches. now, all her clients are carefully vetted – which is why she’s shocked when, one days, a teenage girl, Riley (Shayelin Martin), bursts into her office unannounced, begging for help. What Cynthia sees attached to Riley terrifies her. She refuses to get involved.

There’s no room here for the simple morality of the average horror film. Jordan, being young, is appalled by her mother’s decision, convinced that they should be there for anyone and everyone who needs help. Meanwhile, Riley’s father, Randall (Shawn Ashmore), tries to find his own way of helping, introducing a different kind of darkness to the film. When Jordan decides that she’s going to try to help Riley herself, regardless of what she’s been told, the stage is set, and viewers will be aware that things are about to go badly wrong.

There are fairy tale aspects to this dark fable. Riley, a fragile creature who looks younger than her stated age, wears a red coat. Her father is a woodcutter. Eventually we will find our way to an overgrown house deep in the woods. Cynthia keeps seeing echoes of that initial dream, in which she was confronted by something wolf-like. Inevitably forced into action in Riley’s case, she’s still trying to deal with that one as well, and by way of this subplot we learn that she routinely supplies leads to the police through a sympathetic officer (Mark Taylor) who is smart enough not to ask where she gets them. Archibald does a good job of skirting the familiar arguments here. It doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t believe in what Cynthia can do, or why the monster does what it does. What is important is all in the moment.

With impressive effects work which blends the practical and the computer-enhanced, It Feeds generates a lot of fear from fairly simple ideas. There’s not actually a lot of gore, but it’s delivered in a way that will make you want to close your eyes. These scenes are considerably enhanced by the work of Martin and O’Brien, both of whom play fear well, whilst elsewhere we get that different kind of terror that parents feel when their children are in danger. Archibald keeps it all rattling along so fast that we don’t have time to worry about much else. It’s only afterwards, as the dust settles, that the parallels that the film draws begin to tease out difficult moral questions, in the process giving the film a sort of afterlife, a presence that lingers after the credits roll. The story may seem familiar on the surface, but there’s something much darker attached to it.

Reviewed on: 19 Apr 2025