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This low-budget horror thriller comes with an almighty directorial last name, but Steven’s daughter Destry serves up precious little that is classically Spielbergian in her debut feature. Forget Dad’s signature childlike wonder; the youngsters in this post-apocalyptic outing – ostracised because minors are asymptomatic carriers of a plague that turns adults into cannibals – are completely feral, opportunistic and worryingly keen to kill. Spielberg’s film is a surprisingly nihilistic, if uneven, splicing of 21st-century young-adult and 1970s exploitation flicks.
After making a break for the border, roving juvenile Mary (Zoe Colletti) takes up with a band of orphans squatting a nearby community centre. Leader Ben (Andrew Liner) is wounded during a botched armed robbery on a service station, so they take refuge in an isolated house. The unlikely owner is plummy, sardonic Brit Clara (Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery) – who stitches him up and deems that what these wastrels really need is a big plate of cookies. When the group wake up imprisoned in Clara’s attic, it should only reinforce rule number one: never eat the cookies.
Mary is spared the sequestration because Clara views her as a potential replacement for her own daughter, part of the 1% of children who succumbed to the pandemic. So the youngster is installed in a flowery bedroom and forced to placate her captor like in Misery, and so the film enters into interestingly queasy gothic-fairytale terrain. But Spielberg balances it uneasily with the pure horror taking place upstairs, not quite satisfactorily constructing one or the other. As the group is shunted off one-by-one to a cold shower and an unspeakable fate in an adjacent room, the wan characterisation means the tension only intermittently smoulders. Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito periodically peps it up as a nosy sheriff.
Please Don’t Feed the Children also has unfortunately frequent recourse to lazy storytelling shortcuts, with characters making ill-advised decisions or conveniently waking early from drug-induced stupors. But Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there’s an edginess to Spielberg’s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.
