‘Come Play’ filled with more clichés than scares

Written and directed by Jacob Chase and based on a 2017 short film by him, “Come Play” takes just about every cliché in the child-stalked-by-demons genre and revels in them as if no one had ever seen them before. But if you know such films as “Poltergeist,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “It” and “The Babadook,” then you’re not going to be surprised by what you find in “Come Play.”

Oliver (a very good Azhy Robertson) is the autistic 7- or 8-year-old son of working-class parents Sarah (Gillian Jacobs) and Marty (John Gallagher Jr.), a handyman and parking lot attendant. Oliver, who wears a hoodie with cloth teeth and likes to spin, loves SpongeBob SquarePants and playing with his phone, which he uses to communicate with others because he does not speak.

One morning, before anyone else is awake, Oliver finds on his phone the story of a “Misunderstood Monster” named Larry, who is a pretty obvious stand-in for Oliver himself, who lost his only best friend, Byron (Winslow Fegley, also very good), by punching him in the face (See, misunderstood?). The lights start to flicker and buzz. Oliver hears something approach down the dark hall. He barricades his door. He “stims” i.e., stimulates himself by clenching his fists and fingers. Later, he goes downstairs and finds his father sleeping on the couch.

At school, Oliver is flagged as different because he must use his phone to speak in class. He gets “special treatment” because he is different. He draws a picture of Larry in ink. It will not be his last. At a nearby field, Byron leads two others in taunting Oliver. Byron takes Oliver’s precious phone and throws it into the weeds. No one thinks to call the phone in order to find it? Yeesh.

So, “Come Play” combines the endangered children genre with phone horror, another branch of modern scary movies, especially J-horror. In fact, we learn that because people spend so much time on their devices, Larry, who is a tall, skeletal, pale, bony monstrosity and who “just wants a friend,” is “made out of loneliness.” All together now … aw. I thought he was made out of a whole lot of other people’s movies.

Chase perhaps should have spent a bit more time trying to make Larry more sympathetic a la Quasimodo, whom he resembles. And guess what? Just when you think Larry is gone, he’s back. You could have figured that out by the film’s running time.

In the one original sequence in “Come Play,” Larry “steps” out of the screens of several thrown-away devices to chase Oliver and Sarah. Almost all the scares in “Come Play” are jump cuts. Jacobs gives emotional truth to Sarah, and Gallagher brings likability and gravitas to a working-class father.

The ending doesn’t make much sense, but I’ll give “Come Play” this. The film’s final image is genuinely poignant. The rest is second-hand.