NOTE: Definite Spoilers below for Unwelcome (and two other older Shudder movies–Dawn Of The Beast and Night’s End–actually)!

I love a good tonal shift in movies… as long as one of two things are true:

-The first being that the movie juggles multiple tones effectively, and nothing really feels out of place in the universe that the film set up.

-Or the second: the movie just switches on a dime and goes from something slow burning into just batshit crazy nonsense.

In terms of the latter, I’m reminded of two other Shudder movies that just floored me with third act mood changes that left me cracking up in my seat. The first was Dawn Of The Beast, a creature feature horror flick that spends two-plus acts as a typical “vacationers in a cabin facing peril” horror effort. It’s watchable, if noticeable for its cheap approach to showing the threat, for it’s early run time.

But in the back half, Dawn Of The Beast goes absolutely bonkers as a SASQUATCH emerges to save the last protagonist standing from a horde of WENDIGO. I never knew I needed a Sasquatch Vs Wendigo movie, but there it was!

Another such flick was Night’s End, a paranormal haunting movie that takes place in the apartment of an agoraphobe who refuses to leave after some trauma. He starts suspecting he might be haunted by a malevolent presence, and the early proceedings are about his tests and investigations into that. It all goes about in a creepy and deliberate manner…

…until late in where he holds an online seance, and one of the members of the seance goes nuts and starts trying to summon the end of the world. My wife and I still occasionally look at each other and shout, “MY THUMB!”. But you’d have to see the movie to get it.

So it’s easy to see where Unwelcome may be going, right? But we’ll get there.

Unwelcome is the story of a young married couple expecting their first child after an apparently hard road to conception. On the night Maya learns she is pregnant, her husband Jamie gets followed home by some street punks outside their England apartment. They break in, attack Jamie, and then viciously assault Maya until the cops arrive. It’s not a sexual assault, but the movie knows that having some villains kicking a newly pregnant woman in the stomach is going to get to basically any viewer.

Shortly thereafter we find out Jamie’s aunt has passed away and left the couple her Irish home. No longer feeling safe in their neighborhood, that’s just what they need, so they move out there. When they arrive, the aunt’s neighbor greets them… and gives them a warning. In the woods behind their home live the Redcaps, mythological creatures that require a blood offering every night. Which is just leaving them some liver from the grocery store, so… not that bad!

Jamie and Maya get themselves back in a bad situation by contracting some work on the house out to the outcast Whelan family, a local group of ne’er-do-wells who definitely seem to cause a lot more damage and mayhem than they repair.

As the movie goes on, Jamie and Maya have to find a way to cope with the abuse from the Whelans and the expectation of leaving offerings for fairytale creatures. And by talking to their new neighbors, they find out what Jamie’s aunt’s dealings with the Redcaps actually entailed…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+For two acts, we get some tragedy and slowly moving plot. Maya suffers a few assaults in the film, one of which does end up being of the sexual variety. Maya and Jamie drift apart as he takes on the modern role of “male partner who thinks everything is about him”. And it’s all perfectly fine. Well-acted and disconcerting to watch, but nothing you haven’t seen in low budget indie horror before.

But then, Unwelcome finally gives us the Redcaps in all of their glory… and that glory is both brutal and hilarious. The creatures are a sheer delight! They are vicious and skilled, but not extremely powerful. We see a few of them get absolutely massacred by the larger humans at times. But we also see them just going berserk on some others. I sputtered a few charmed “What is this?!” as I watched the mayhem unfurl.

And as the runtime slips by, events just get wilder and wilder. You keep thinking the silliest thing Unwelcome can do is passed, but then it tops it somehow.

+There are some surprisingly good names and recognizable faces here. Hannah John-Kamen, Colm Meaney, and Kristian Nairn all star in large roles. It’s nice to get some people that viewers will recognize (even if they have to look up from where) in a flick like this.

–The “rules” for the Redcaps are never really explained, nor is why they want what they want, nor what the hell is exactly going on in the very last scene. If you are here for a movie that makes sense and doesn’t have any dangling plot threads… maybe look elsewhere. The movie takes more pride in just getting sillier and sillier than in explaining WHY things might be going in that direction. The motivations of the ‘Caps is a mystery. If you think about it… you’ll just frustrate yourself.

-Douglas Booth as Jamie does a good enough job in the role, so while this down isn’t on him, the Jamie character suffers a lot of developmental problems throughout. He starts off as this funny, doting husband who adores his wife more than anything on Earth. And then, by the time the Redcaps get involved, he is a brooding, self-deluding, pathetic asshole. He shouts at Maya, constantly acts petulant, and won’t stop letting his mouth write checks his fists can’t cash. At a point, it feels like the movie is working too hard to make him unlikable.

It’s the kind of radical turn that feels more like the movie is forcing it to happen than like it is organic for Jamie. You get the feeling the writers just wanted to hop on board the bandwagon of, like, any Florence Pugh movie and make a love interest who doesn’t deserve our heroine.

OVERALL

Unwelcome does both of its tones very well, and when the shift occurs, it lets you exhale–mostly in the form of a laugh–after all of the early tension. Jamie’s characterization is nonsense, sure, and the locals (aside from The Whelans) don’t really matter as much as they should, but… The Redcaps, man. So much fun. And not for nothing, but my Cinematic Line Of 2023 right now is unquestionably “No hitting! Silly billy”.