Separation stars Rupert Friend (Hitman: Agent 47) as Jeff, a down on his luck comic book artist whose wife, Maggie (Mamie Gummer, John Carpenter’s The Ward) leaves him and takes their young daughter with her. A nasty divorce ensues with an even nastier child custody battle. It seems that Maggie plans on full custody over their daughter, Jenny (Violet McGraw, Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House). In addition, she and Jenny will be moving far away. This turns out to be a good domestic drama. If it stayed on this course, I would have still liked the film as is. However, this is a horror film and things have to get dark.
At one point, Maggie is killed in a hit and run “accident” and things start to change in the narrative. Jenny starts acting younger than she is, referring to herself in the third person as “Baby”. Jeff starts having nightmares and even visions of his eerie comic book creations coming to life. On the other hand, Jenny sees a figure in real life. Jeff believes this figure is an imaginary friend and tells his daughter not to be afraid of it. In time, Jenny starts to refer to this thing as her mother. It takes some time for Jeff to accept this and not view it as part of Jenny’s coping mechanism to help with the loss of her mother. In the meantime, Maggie’s father (Brian Cox, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) is trying to find out the truth about the death of his daughter. Most of this is kept off-screen and brought back near the end of the film to good effect.
I do not think I have ever seen Friend in anything. He carries this film very well. Jeff is a man/child and you can understand why Maggie is so frustrated with him. Though I am sure that Gummer would have been great if the character had more screen time. It is just that we see mostly her being sweet with her daughter and fuming mad at Jeff. We get that also from Cox’s character, Rivers. Yet, with more screen time, he gets more depth to his character. As Jeff’s character becomes increasingly more mature, Cox becomes much more accepting of him. Violet McGraw is a great find. She has loads of charm. In addition, she and Friend have great chemistry as father and daughter.
Director, William Brent Bell may be best known for that silly doll movie, The Boy, and its sequel (which I passed on), I have hope he is on the right track. He does a great job of building suspense and scares. The pacing, for the most part, is spot-on. I did feel that the second act wanted to linger longer than needed. Nevertheless, that is a rather small quibble. The one small problem I have with this flick is the last scare. It is one of those things that filmmakers like to place at the end of such films to tell the audience that the danger is still around. In this film—and many more—we all know that is BS. It is not one of my favorite movie trends.
In conclusion, this is a solid horror flick, with some great drama and some good scares.
Rating: 3 and a half stars out of 5
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