The Djinn (2021)

The Djinn is about childhood traumas and lifestyle changes. It tells the story of Dylan (Ezra Dewey), a mute boy who blames himself for his mom’s death. He also condemns himself for being speech-impaired, and he thinks that if he did not have that condition, everything could had been different. At the beginning, the movie shows us a new house, where Dylan and his father Michael (Rob Brownstein) just moved in. Dylan’s father is working all night in a radio channel, and he is forced to leave his son home alone. At that point is when the action starts. Dylan finds a dusty old book inside his bedroom’s closet, called “The Book of Shadows”. In that book, the kid discovers a ritual to invoke a djinn and make one wish, with the condition that it might take the child’s soul. The boy does not hesitate to prepare the mischievous ceremony, and as you can imagine, there are lots of problems related with calling upon an evil djinn. The creature is heinous and a prototypical monster, whose natural shape we cannot fully appreciate because it adopts the appearance of other people. The entire film is shot inside the house, which turns out to be like a maze where the wicked creature is trying to chase Dylan. However, some scary scenes may produce about as much fear as a fluffy pet running behind you around your house. Predictive, full of clichés, and most of the time dull, some of the scariest scenes are only a bad characterization of the djinn who performs a plain scream, clearly trying to jolt you in a forced and silly way. However, not everything is negative in The Djinn. Actually, there is something pretty accurate: the details related to Dylan’s speech-impairment. The kid was born without a voice, so the tedious 'frightening' scenes achieve to be a little bit more interesting when you put yourself in the child’s shoes. The feeling of running away from the monster without being able to scream or say anything creates an oppressive atmosphere from which you would obviously wish to escape if you were him. Another good point is that every time when Dylan reads or thinks something, he does it with his father's voice, the voice that he listens every day. His inner voice is not his own voice, which is a good detail that helps to depict more realistically the whole situation. Overall, apart from certain glimmers of promise, The Djinn