It was only a couple of months ago that filmmaking team David Charbonier and Justin Powell had us all on the edge of our seats with their film The Boy Behind the Door. It was a bold debut, one that placed children in real danger and created a suffocating amount of tension. Thanks to the bottleneck caused by the pandemic, the pair’s follow-up feature, The Djinn, will arrive in UK cinemas this week. The Djinn once more places a child in peril, Charbonier and Powell reuniting with one of their The Boy Behind the Door actors, Ezra Dewey. In their last venture together, Dewey played the eponymous boy behind the door, the trapped friend that had to be rescued. This time Dewey is the sole protagonist, playing a young mute boy, Dylan. After witnessing the suicide of his mother, Dylan and his father (Rob Brownstein) move into a new apartment. Dylan’s father is a late-night DJ and Dylan spends his nights alone. One night he discovers a book that tells of a ritual to get your heart’s desire and he decides to give it a go. The ritual however, calls forth a vengeful Djinn and Dylan finds himself in immediate danger.
The Djinn is set in the year of 1989; the time period has enabled Charbonier and Powell to fill the screen not only with nostalgic things from the era, but also explain away some of the plot points. Although young, Dylan is left alone overnight every night while his father goes to work. Many adults, parents or not, will find the idea of this horrifying, and yet back then societal norms were different and children were more frequently placed into these sort of situations. Once the viewer has gotten their head around that shock, they can start to look beyond and see all the old school low-fi tech on display: the ghetto blaster, the neon-lit fish bowl, the lack of late night television.
With it just being Dylan alone in the house and him unable to speak, The Djinn relies heavily on a mixture of quiet and score to get it’s story across. The eighties setting of course means that the music composed by Matthew James has a distinct synth-driven tone. With so many sequences playing out with no dialogue, The Djinn feels almost like a silent horror movie. It’s a type of film that many will have thought lost years ago and yet here Charbonier and Powell prove that there might still be an appetite for this style.
Charbonier and Powell proved they could create tension in The Boy Behind the Door, and The Djinn continues to demonstrate this talent. With Dylan rendered unable to speak much, The Djinn plays out in near silence and unsettles the nerves. It doesn’t quite reach the same heights of unease as The Boy Behind the Door, but that is simply down to the situation our character is placed into. The Boy Behind the Door pitted kids against nefarious adults and had a strong real-world connection, this time the monstrous entity is a mythical being and as such the stakes are instantly diluted.
The story lends itself to comparisons to The Twilight Zone, and in many ways The Djinn does feel like an extended episode of the show. That is not a slight on the film at all, in fact it’s much more of a compliment; if you grew up on the show, you’ll find a lot to treasure here. Despite the common theme of kids in peril, The Djinn is a very different beast to the previous work of Charbonier and Powell. The two prove they have a lot more to show and once more we’ll be intrigued to see what new direction (or what new ways they find to put children into danger) they venture into next time.
The Djinn
Summary
The Djinn builds upon the work started with The Boy Behind the Door and proves that Charbonier and Powell are a directing team to keep a close eye on.
The Djinn opens in UK cinemas on 17th September 2021.
