When I Consume You‘s Unsparing Horror Will Eat You Alive
Perry Blackshear’s new film When I Consume You would’ve been a splendid title for a Shudder cooking show: Creatures of the night gorily prepare expired ingredients using eldritch techniques perfected by the old gods themselves. But it suits the film nicely, too, adopting multifaceted malice as Blackshear judiciously doles out new plot bulletins minute by minute. “When I consume you” is a macabre declaration, then a threat, then a promise that carries the weight of inevitability. Your consumption is guaranteed—an assurance of doom rather than a possibility.
The “you” are the Shaw siblings, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Will (Evan Dumouchel), survivors of a hardscrabble childhood now making their way as adults. Will, a scruffy, laconic wreck, leans on Daphne for constant support. Daphne, meanwhile, is sober going on five years, and while stability is a struggle, she’s on track toward getting her house in order. When Will finds her dead of an apparent suicide, he helplessly flails like a man drowning at sea, until, limb by limb, Daphne returns from the other side with a fuzzy memory and a desperate plea to her brother: Don’t confront her killer. Of course, he does, against her advice.
That’s all within When I Consume You’s first half-hour, structured carefully for atmosphere and to maximize spookiness. Blackshear gently eases the movie into full-on frightening territory, his highest priorities being character development and chilling foreshadowing. That delicate craftsmanship makes the smallest gestures toward genre, like Daphne directing Will from beyond the grave toward a stashed box of her personal effects, feel colossal. It’s a patchwork evidence trail disclosing vague minutiae of her life that might explain her death. Not long after, she emerges from under the bed, a mostly friendly ghost. It’s an odd but ultimately happy phantasmal reunion, where Dumouchel and Ewing cement their brother-sister chemistry and Blackshear ushers When I Consume You wholly into horror’s domain.
The shift is worth the wait, but the wait is worth itself, too. Blackshear blocks shot after shot as buttressing corroborative detail for the ways the Shaws relate to each other and to the world: One moment, he’s filming them in a wide-angled bird’s eye view as they smoke on her fire escape, emphasizing the gap between the building and adjacent train tracks to signal the siblings’ self-imposed distance from society; the next, the camera goes into handheld mode, juddering as they rush through the cacophony of a crowded subway platform. Even Daphne’s gradual resurrection is orchestrated with a sense of invention: Blackshear starts off with her hands gliding into frame, twice stopping Will from dialing 9-1-1, then dialing the number he needs to call to recover her possessions.