Over her winter break, Riley, a college junior, is persuaded by her estranged parents, Kathy and John, to visit home to fix their fractured relationship. As Riley settles in, she discovers that her parents have developed an unsettling friendship with her high school ex, Gordon, and that mysterious children are now living in the house. A series of disturbing flashbacks reveal Kathy and John’s time at an eerie, unconventional couples therapy retreat that promised to heal their problems through supernatural means. As the day progresses, Riley starts to uncover the dark and twisted truth of her parents’ desperate attempts to mend the deep issues plaguing their family.
Daniel: Without even reading the synopsis, the title of this movie brought to my mind Children of the Corn, or something from the folk horror vein. I was a bit surprised then to find this to a be more of a psychological horror of dysfunctional family dynamics that spends more time with college-age Riley and her parents rather than the children. Aside from Riley, the adults in this movie are far more creepy than the children, particularly given that the problems of the adults are formed through their choices and desperation, rather than strictly genetic.
Shaun: Surely they were aware that the casual and well-versed horror fan would make that connection with the title. And since I made the same connection, I started to think about what they had hoped to evoke in that name. Both films have a cult narrative at the core, though Pines seems to verge heavily into the new religious movement side of cults whereas Corn seems more linked to the evangelical revivalist movements. Thus, there is a modern retelling here, one linking an otherworldly spiritualism to modern psychiatry, as evidenced by the way Pines centers the adults’ narrative around what appears to be a therapy session with strange undertones and later unveils spiritual proceedings reminiscent of cult gatherings as frequently imagined in film. The psychiatry, thus, becomes the gateway to the spiritual (and, naturally, the horror). Structurally, then, this is a dramatically different film from Corn, but thematically, there are some connections that don’t seem accidental.
Daniel: I’m with you on the switch here from evangelical revivalist cult to a new-age sort of cult, but the link between modern psychiatry to the supernatural consists of just using the airs of psychiatry or therapy to trap them within the cult. What was interesting to me was that the parents are never really interested in the work or change required for familial redemption or healing. They’re after an easy solution that doesn’t really require for them to change, a magical solution without the discomfort of facing problems. Actual therapy would of course be all about them actually delving into the issues and facing things. A big theme of the movie as I read it revolves around the issue of people being willing to change or not – or even the capacity for actual change. Riley at least seems somewhat open to the idea that her parents might be able to change. She decides to come home. But she quickly comes to regret this as she sees how her parents and former boyfriend are living under the power of this cult, this shared delusion that they’re going to make things better.
Shaun: This is actually where I had some issues with the film. It seemed to me that this film wanted to be about quite a many number of things that it didn’t have the runtime or budget to present. The opening sequence clearly sets up a domestic violence narrative, with Riley’s father verbally abusing his family before bursting into the closet where young Riley and her mother are hiding (make no peeps…) and, we have to assume, physically attacking them. Yet, there is also a narrative here about lost loves and refusing to let go, correcting the past (or redemption), the disturbing world of cult violence and its impact on converts, and various sub-narratives around these. While I think the film’s interest in correcting the past is its most compelling story, especially when coupled with the overt domestic violence narrative at the beginning, I think it moves too far into “too much” territory when it tries to use flashbacks to show the cult at work or Gordon’s confession of love to Riley in their youth. In other words, the story gets a bit muddled, both because I lose track of what the film is trying to be about and because the film doesn’t quite stick the landing for all of the stories it is trying to tell.
Daniel: Exactly! What really stuck out for me in terms of it making everything seem muddled were those scenes back to the cult, particularly with Zoe and Marie. I have to confess I still don’t quite understand their point to the overall movie or the plot. The cult flashback scenes seemed to be there to add some supernatural horror, a smattering of violence/gore that a viewer might expect from the movie. There’s no time/space to devote to the background and story here of the cult and these other girls.
Sticking to the core Riley portion of the story in the present would have worked better, also because I think Kelly Tappan gives such a great performance as the character. The other characters are almost cartoonish, which can work if one wants to chew the scenes with a bit of horror campiness. Donna Rae Allen does a phenomenal job in this as Lorelei in the intro to the movie with her false smile and saccharine delivery to lure Kathy in. But Riley is the moral voice amid all the madness of everyone else in the film. Tappan gives an authority and emotion to her arguments and pleas, and she gives some really good well-articulated lines of how screwed up the familial situation is. Why that is an issue and why she needs to step out of it. On the downside, that strong performance and delivery of the script I thought contrasted harshly with other parts of the script that seemed less well written, particularly the voice-over narration given to Tappan as Riley. It comes across as cold and unfeeling, unnecessary and jarring.
Shaun: I’ll admit that the voice over narrations had me rather perplexed. They were somewhat philosophical but didn’t feel grounded to the story we were there to see, especially the one that eventually unfolds. One line that stuck out to me in this regard concerned small towns and their tendency towards stagnation (same people and same buildings). On the one hand, this lines up with some of the problems small town America (and probably elsewhere) has faced in terms of an inability to adapt to changing times; on the other hand, it’s not clear that this is the critique being offered because very little of the story is actually about the nature of small towns (their tendency towards insularity, etc.). Some of the lines in these voice-overs are interesting (I like the one about terror quite a lot), but they don’t feel particularly anchored to the story in the same way as some of the visualized plot points don’t. They come across as stylistic choices rather than ones necessary for the story. Still, I’d rather they try for something stylistic and interesting, especially on a small budget, than do something entirely conventional.
However, I do think there are compelling ideas in this story even if it is one that might benefit from an edit or reshoots that we’re unlikely to get. One that I suspect you’ll address is the theme of change, here teased out through an extended family trying to right its wrongs (father and mother) or trying to hold onto something that long since ended (Gordon). There lies an incredible irony in the way Allan’s Lorelei, who initially comes across to us as a kind of therapist before being revealed as an especially twisted cultist: the very thing these characters need to right the past or find a path forward – therapy – is the gateway into a regressive (and violent) philosophy of life. Only Riley seems to have begun the process to change, albeit with all the trauma one would expect of a young woman raised in an abusive home. This to me feels like the core of the film, and a powerful one at that.
Daniel: This is what I love about these discussions, they trigger things that I just hadn’t fully thought about while watching the movie, or while mulling it over afterwards. For most of the movie I was centered on how much more compelling I found Riley’s character, yet ironically I failed to fully appreciate that she’s the only one depicted as capable and demonstrating personal change. I noted the theme of ‘the capacity for change’ throughout the movie, but for some reason became solely focused in that regard on how Gordon, her parents, and by proxy the children all profess wanting to change for the better, yet show no evidence of actually doing so. I became stuck on what the director Joshua Morgan was trying to say exactly about the capacity for people to change. Can they ever really? Considering Riley, the answer I seems to be yes. But it comes at that price of painful work confronting the trauma. On the other hand, we’ve not seen Riley ever do anything wrong, or make a mistake that would require her to change herself in the way the others would need to. I think I would have appreciated it all more if she had some stain that she had to work through. Though she’s the only one to embrace change, her path doesn’t involve redemption. So the movie still leaves open that question of can people change in that sense of redemption from wrongs.
Shaun: Change also has other potential ironies for Riley. As we’ve both noted, she is the only one who seems to have changed, but her change is the result of abandoning the past – literally, by leaving it behind. The audience should be sympathetic to this kind of change because of its roots in domestic violence and trauma; however, it remains a change of extremes rather than the more measured change one might expect of the illusory therapy everyone else in the story pursues. And therein lies another irony: the two paths of change we’re presented are both extremes – one involving severing from the past and one involving radically returning to it through the supernatural (the rebirthed kids element of this story, which we really haven’t touch on and about which we probably shouldn’t say much more…). It seemed to me that the story is not interested in actual redemption but in the ways that the past never leaves us and continues to haunt us to the point that we either commit our souls to something horrifying to fix it or we cut ourselves off from it. As is common in horror, this is a tragedy in the making.
As we’ve acknowledged, there is a great story to be told here, and in parts, this film tells that story well. The family dynamic is uncomfortable and awkward as any family keeping horrible secrets from one another would be, and that unsettling tone sticks throughout the film even when it diverges into storylines that are poorly established or explored (or which distract from the core plot). Here, I think the film’s poster is a great representation of the film’s issues: if you go into this movie having the poster as your guide, you’d expect satanic imagery, creepy children, and all of the things implied by the Children of the Corn reference you made at the beginning. And if you watch the first 10 minutes of this film, you’d expect a narrative about domestic violence that twists into something horrifying. Certainly, the film gives you elements of each of those stories, but it doesn’t commit to either to the degree that it must. Without that commitment, the film ultimately suffers, however compelling some of its ideas.
Daniel: For a young writer/director, and for his debut feature, Joshua Morgan’s Children of the Pines has more successes than failures, making it feel for me as service-ably good, even entertaining, but falling short of great note. There are components to the film that we’ve talked about here that shine enough for me to see Morgan creating more fully realized and powerful movies in the future, working out construction and his ideas more clearly.
Nonetheless, anyone who really likes psychological thrillers that focus on family dynamics should at least mark Children of the Pines as a movie to check out. Currently it is available streaming for very affordable rental on multiple platforms. I don’t see anything regarding physical release plans, but I imagine it will at least find more broad streaming in time to come, so even if you don’t immediately seek it out, keep it in mind for giving a view when you see it pop up.
Poster for Children of the Pines.
Disclosure: We received a complimentary screener for this film from its distributor.
Dr. Shaun Duke is an instructor at DMACC and the Director of the Portolan Project at the Speculative Literature Foundation. He received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies science fiction, digital fan cultures, Caribbean literature, literary canons, postcolonialism, and digital rhetoric.
In addition to his academic work, he wears many hats. He is a writer of genre fiction and a freelance editor at The Duke of Editing. His fiction has appeared in Curiouser Magazine, Stupefying Stories, and elsewhere. He also hosts and produces The Skiffy and Fanty Show, a four-time Hugo Award finalist podcast dedicated to examining the literary, cinematic, and cultural world of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His podcast work has sent him around the world to participate in conventions, conduct interviews, and more. When he's not podcasting, he can be found on his Twitch channel, AlphabetStreams, or Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and other social media places.
