Horror loves its missing kids. But with increasing frequency, they’re starting to come back: safely restored to the family womb or, more often than not, unsafely. They’re different. Something happened when they were away. At first glance, Where’s Rose bites off a lot of genre tropes: creepy kids, foodsy folk-horror, familial melodrama, body Snatcher-paranoia, a formidable monster, and a brief, effective passage of heartfelt gore. Mathis seamlessly balances all of these constructs in a suburb coiled within endless swaths of woodland that augur no happy endings.

Dead children, missing children, or the combination of the two are always effective in a sad sort of way. But the model’s changed since W.W. Jacobs wrote of a mangled son’s homecoming in 1902’s The Monkey’s Paw or that two year-old stood snarling with a scalpel in 1989’s Pet Semetery. This new brood seems okay, but they tend to bring back a lot of secrets that, in the hands of director John Mathis, contain a disconcerting dose of the lurid.

Plenty of kids have imaginary friends, but why does Rose Daniels (Skyler Elyse Philpot) talk to the woods? On top of that, she disappears into them. So follows an extensive manhunt and two days of family panic after which she is returned. But is she still Rose? Considering just a few recent offerings (Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s Here Comes the Devil, Veronika Franz and Severin Fialand’s Goodnight, Mommy, and Jordan Peel’s Us), it feels as though it would be better for everyone if she’d stayed lost.

Rose’s older brother Eric (Ty Simpkins, the original Bad Seed of the Insidious franchise), is the first to suspect there’s something wrong. But things have been wrong for some time. For example, why does his childhood friend Jessica (Anneliese Judge) avoid him with something approaching terror? Why have her eyes turned black the same way Rose’s did after her return from the woods? And why would she take a razor to her wrists? Despite the wellness podcast Eric plays on rotation as he ambles around the hood waiting to leave for college, is it possible that he’s responsible for Jessica’s unravelling?

“This is now,” the woman on the podcast asserts as a voiceover throughout the film. “Every moment in your life has lead up to this.” But sometimes empowering words give suggestible listeners the impression that it’s alright to do bad things. When Eric confronts the strange young girl passing for his sister, her response stands in direct contrast to the podcast’s new age platitudes: “What’s love?… It’s interesting. You all live for it.” Having dismantled the family unit with a simple question, she punctuates the inquisition with that eternal truth: “Everyone dies.” Like the podcast says, every moment leads up to it.

To the present reviewer, Where’s Rose required two viewings in order to glean a remotely cogent package. While necessary re-watches can feel like an imposition when due to a director’s ineptitude, Rose is layered with subtleties that opt for eerie revelations over jump-scares, simmering evil over chaos, and a lugubrious malaise that hangs heavy over  bright summer days and the nocturnal woodland void. A creep-fest to be enjoyed not for it’s cohesion, Mathis conjures a puzzle capable of numberless reinterpretations independent of his conscious intent.

It’s any director’s most coveted trick. A trick that, long after the viewer has drawn their own conclusions following the film’s denouement, they’re likely to reevaluate Where’s Rose with another viewing. And another. And if Mathis has pulled this off in his sophomore outing, his future catalog augurs his standing as a director willing to bring the creep factor to an apex and the dread of ambiguity way past eleven.

8 out of 10