User Reviews

"Captain Hook killed my father"!

And slept with his mum. And yes we get visualisation of it too. No, seriously. This also includes the kid's traumatised face.

The cast of 'Child in the Night' are the drawcard attraction. Although no lie, the poster artwork had my mouth watering until I found out it was made for TV. So my expectations dipped and rightfully so. A young boy (Elijah Wood) witnesses his father murdered by a man with a cargo hook in a yellow slicker, and develops post traumatic stress where he begins to fictionalise the events in a way to cope with the ordeal, hindering detectives. Lead detective pairs up with a former child psychologist fighting her own demons.

One-note police procedural story and script with tv boundaries, given potency by reliable JoBeth Williams & Tom Skerritt performances. The dynamic between the two with their flirtatious frictions was definitely more interesting than the on-going investigation. No wonder because half of the film is spent on their interactions. As the investigative side of the story hardly comes out first gear. The languid questioning of possible leads, the usual suspects and festering inner circle dramas, which could lead to murder. Severely melodramatic and foreseeable in its soap-like writing. The urgency or threat is lacking throughout with one moment standing out in the entire film involving the killer still in the room cleaning the murder weapon in the bathroom unbeknown to them someone nearby is watching. Alas the build-up doesn't payoff though... but again what do you expect from a TV movie. Intercutting the narrative was a novelty element where the real life incidents were parallels to a children's story; Peter Pan. Those fictionalised scenes of Captain Hook and Wood seeing himself as Peter Pan in an attempt the suppress the horrific memory of his father's murder had a goofy charm, which mildly amused. The story probably could have done without these images, and just played on the child's verbal expressions of what he saw from the viewpoint of a kid's story... but this script wanted nothing subtle.

Disappointingly for some reason the YouTube channel I was watching cuts the film right after it reveals the killer, and his crackpot speech... to start at the beginning again. So you miss the last 5 minutes, which is probably the most livelier part of the film.