Please Disregard Destry Allyn Spielberg’s Please Don’t Feed the Children

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It cannot, in any sense of the word, be “easy” to feel confident in harboring artistic dreams of your own when you’re the child of one of the most famously prolific artistic geniuses of all time. To be the daughter of none other than nine-time Oscar-nominated directorial icon Steven Spielberg, the man who more than any other mastered the art of the smart-but-accessible populist blockbuster, you couldn’t possibly avoid being intensely aware of how rigorously any filmmaking work you produce will be critiqued. Will you also be provided with invaluable entertainment world connections thanks to your nepo baby status? Absolutely, but surely it would be “easier” to just parlay those connections into a tangential career, one that won’t involve constant comparison to your still-active icon of a father. For the likes of Destry Allyn Spielberg to actually commit to directing feature films shows considerable backbone, an acknowledgement that she’s prepared to suffer some slings and arrows for her passion–and unrealistic expectations that she arrive fully formed as an artist in her first-ever feature projects. Such expectations truly aren’t fair, and critics should remember that in debut feature Please Don’t Feed the Children, they’re seeing the work of a relatively inexperienced artist.

Unfortunately, that lack of experience shows, as this Tubi original, sci-fi-horror-tinged thriller ultimately comes off as a conflicted, scattershot mess, let down less by anything related to Spielberg’s direction and more by a perplexing screenplay, amateurish technical issues, and occasional weakness in its performances, with the exception of headliner Michelle Dockery. A confused mashup of psychological imprisonment thrillers, dystopian social satire and even something adjacent to zombie horror, it’s bereft of actual ideas despite its cement mixer of a premise, struggling to pad out its runtime with 10 minutes of limping credits at its conclusion, leaving 83 minutes as a remainder that feels like a short film or anthology entry dragged kicking and screaming to feature length.

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The awkward opening narration from viewpoint protagonist Mary (Zoe Colletti) lays out a sci-fi horror premise that never coalesces into much of anything we’re given a chance to witness on screen, feeling like descriptive language written for another film with a much bigger budget–“telling” rather than “showing” is a consistent issue here. We’re dropped into the aftermath of a deadly viral pandemic (ring any bells?), which has created large numbers of roaming orphan gangs after the disease primarily infected and killed adults–an opening radio broadcast briefly exclaims that “somehow this virus is turning people into cannibals,” but the film isn’t the least bit interested in the obvious Romero-like implications, and the virus itself is barely relevant to the narrative except via one painfully obvious third act reveal. The actual purpose of the virus and all the death that occurs in this setting before we pick up our story in it is to reframe the role of children in this setting: Because they were labeled as asymptomatic carriers of the virus, everyone under a certain age (no details here) was blamed by society for much of the tragedy, and subsequently rounded up and placed into camps by the government for monitoring, quarantine and brutal discipline. Those not under government control form outlaw gangs of kids, ever on the move, searching for freedom. Sounds like our protagonist group, eh?

But here we run into one of the most fundamental issues with Paul Bertino’s screenplay for Please Don’t Feed the Children, and the casting directors who executed it: They forgot to put any children in their movie, despite its title. All of the characters are not only teens, but unmistakably older teens, which has bizarre ripple effects throughout this story given how the characters are so often portrayed. Passive, panicked protagonist Mary is portrayed by actress Zoe Colletti, who was 22 during the filming of Please Don’t Feed the Children. Her character? Stated to be 16 years old, but she’s such a wide-eyed shrinking violet that she behaves more like 12. She states that she’s aiming to reach “the border,” which is “safe for kids,” but does it really make any sense for someone played by a 22-year-old actress, a character that has theoretically been hardened by years of loss and escape from work camps (where she lost her younger sister) to still view herself as “a kid” in this setting? Surely it would be easier for this young woman to blend in with adult society than it would be for her to escape past walls and death squads to another country?

This leads to a constant, unanswered question of what constitutes a “kid” or “child” in this setting in general, made only more confusing by the (sexually active and very ‘adult’) group of punk teens she finds herself suddenly adopted into. Their leader Ben (Andrew Liner) looks like he’s about 25 (IMDB says 24), and the last person who would need a fake ID to buy gas station snacks. Is this society really so against these “kids,” and at what point does one stop being a kid in this setting? Are you just released from the quarantine camps when you turn 18, or 19, or 20, and then welcomed into adulthood like nothing happened? Are we the audience really supposed to be able to see this gang as a bunch of vulnerable “children” when they can all drive, make out and wield handguns? It feels like the narrative would inherently make so much more sense if none of the protagonists were older than 10 or so, which would make the group far easier to root for as genuine underdogs in a hostile adult society. As they are, the “kids” are so clearly adult that when they’re finally taken prisoner by a nurse with sinister intentions (Dockery), you can’t help but wonder why the group of them wouldn’t simply overpower her at practically any time. I’m pretty sure half a dozen robust teens can wipe the floor with a petite English woman, once they get past their initial surprise of being drugged by her tea and biscuits–a thing that does indeed occur in Please Don’t Feed the Children.

At its heart, the genre the film most closely hews to is psychological imprisonment thriller: Once Dockery’s seemingly helpful widower Clara (she lost her husband and child to the virus as well) captures the group in her web, she starts to pick them off one by one, while simultaneously attempting to indoctrinate Mary into a picturesque replacement for her dead daughter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Downton Abbey veteran is the one person who turns in a reliable performance as the grieving, fractured and psychotic antagonist, even if it is your fairly standard Annie Wilkes riff. She’s joined in brief snatches by Giancarlo Esposito as a local sheriff looking into the roving kids, but despite a few moments of tender reminiscence they share of the world before tragedy, he doesn’t have nearly enough screentime to register as a real character. That leaves Dockery shouldering the entire burden of Please Don’t Feed the Children, where her solid professionalism and competence only highlights less than inspired, cliché-ridden performances from all of the “children.”

The film eventually lurches into more overt horror territory, but it’s quite tame in that respect, even when it suddenly remembers mention of “cannibal” infected, some 70 minutes or so after the idea was first broached. There’s a paper-thin amount of what might generously be described as “plot” that is meant to propel us in the direction of the finish line–a few poorly conceived escape attempts by the kids with extremely unclear and nonsensical plans attached to them, and subsequent punishments heaped onto the prisoners by Dockery’s increasingly crazed and delusional captor, with Mary strung along as her whimpering but ever-passive accomplice. It’s difficult to root for any of them, given that even though they’ve been confined in a room by a crazy person, they still seem to believe her when asking where their missing friend is, and hearing “…you’ll join him soon” in response. This is, uh … not the kind of thing you should want to hear your captor say, for the record. The fact that the kids eventually defeat Dockery with relative ease once they finally attempt to do so, meanwhile, only makes them feel that much more incompetent in retrospect. Again, this dynamic would have been more innately thrilling, easier to accept and more fraught with peril if the protagonists were being portrayed by young, vulnerable children rather than actors who might already have 401(k) accounts.

These narrative issues only compound some of the film’s simultaneous technical rough edges, particularly in the case of an audio mix that often feels strangely calculated: In its opening moments, one can barely parse some of Colletti’s narration because she’s being drowned out by both the score and sound effects. Mumbly dialogue is often overwhelmed by any other source of sound, and it becomes a blessing when the score eventually disappears entirely for extended sections of the film. In that sense, the score is actually reminiscent of so many of its narrative elements, which are introduced and then disappear for the bulk, only to finally be recalled at the last second.

In the end, Spielberg’s film is competently if not particularly engagingly directed, but most of its other elements–outside of Dockery’s casting–have not been well rationalized. It ends up falling back on sturdy but tired old tropes for lack of anything else to do–a shot, for instance, of a villain “unconscious” on the ground, with a slow zoom on the face … and then their eyes open! Woah guys, some chilling stuff there. Nothing about that will feel tediously familiar to the audience, rest assured.

Perhaps Destry Allyn Spielberg will blossom into a great fashioner of populist blockbusters like her dad in time, or maybe she’ll forge her own path of eclectic, less marketable cinema. Maybe she’ll ditch filmmaking entirely in the wake of this experience, and leave the Spielbergian filmmaking torch to someone like brother Sawyer Avery Spielberg, another aspiring director who hasn’t yet produced his first feature. Maybe she can sing, and will end up on stage with sister Sasha Rebecca Spielberg, better known by stage name Buzzy Lee. Or maybe she’ll tap in to what I can only assume is an absolutely disgusting family trust fund to create a great charitable foundation, positively impacting the world in that way. Nearly anything is possible, with a name like the one she was born into. But regardless of what she chooses to do, I rather doubt that even 40 years from now, if she’s viewed as a titan of the industry, anyone will be looking back with fond critical reappraisal of her debut Tubi original movie. Some flicks are just meant for the streaming service compost heap.

If, however, Please Don’t Feed the Children is one day viewed as a cult classic decades from now, feel free to dredge up this review and feed it right back to me. I will clearly deserve it.

Director: Destry Allyn Spielberg
Writer: Paul Bertino
Stars: Zoe Colletti, Michelle Dockery, Giancarlo Esposito, Andrew Liner, Dean Scott Vazquez, Regan Aliyah
Release date: June 27, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.