‘Grimcutty’ Review: The Internet meme becomes our professor?

Hulu’s newest thriller psychs out viewers with their social media monster meme, the eponymous Grimcutty. But this creepy critter is undercut by the movie’s incessant need to preach.

From writer/director John Ross, Grimcutty features an internet meme turned boogeyman. Born from the depths of our societal fears, this beast has the ability to control others’ minds and bodies, turning kids into knife-wielding threats to themselves and their families. The Catch? Grimcutty’s power relies on the attention and fear-mongering that society is fantastic at creating. Specifically, parental anxiety is gasoline to the fire that is the monster meme!

The film has a genuinely thrilling premise surrounding the horrors of social media dependency and exploitative internet challenges like the infamous cinnamon challenge and the milk crate challenge. Usually depicted on YouTube, TikTok and other media platforms as harmless fun, these challenges may prove to be more dangerous than what we could ever imagine. The excitement of horror, after all, relies on the fear of the unknown, or the ‘mysteria.’ Yet, Grimcutty can’t get enough of giving away its meme-monster’s mysteries.

At the height of some of the most gripping scenes, watchers are met with a curated explanation of how Grimcutty feeds and who the most vulnerable victims are. Instead of allowing viewers to experience the scare, Grimcutty spells out why you should be scared and when. When it comes to the why, Ross goes too far, spoonfeeding us instead of horrifying us.

Toying with the dangers of social media and internet addiction, Ross offers excitingly new contributions to influencer and content creator culture. As a fanatic for ironic deep cuts, I especially loved the satire surrounding the chaotic Mommy Blogger with more than a few skeletons in her closet — including her son, who’s been forcefully confined to his own padded closet.

Melinda Jaynes (Alona Tal) creates a picture-perfect facade with her even more perfect son. However, it is later revealed she is a desperate, shotgun-toting manipulator, publicly using her son as a brand while she privately neglects him. The poor, cookie-cutter-perfect blogger can’t seem to calm her worrying, which induces her son’s Grimcutty attacks. Grimcutty foregrounds an excellent narrative surrounding, where the high-valued meanings of internet interactions actually originate from (spoiler alert: ourselves.)

Credit: Hulu

The film’s ultimate message takes a noble middle-ground approach in emphasizing the inevitable generational gap that lies in internet usage and social media navigation. Emphasizing society’s inability to shift our attention away from social media and constantly struggling for technology access, Ross instead offers the option to focus more on intrapersonal connections. Grimcutty exhibits how removing the value attached to internet interactions removes the power it holds altogether. Ross’ interpretation points to the morality division between Gen Z and Gen X. Nevertheless, the inherent horror that exists within internet culture was dismally wasted on the telegraphic nature of the movie’s overarching and ‘preachy’ theme.

The opening attack scene features a young kid Brandon Jaynes (Kayden Alexander Koshelev) trying to escape the ominous Grimcutty as his mother Melinda is cooped up in her office. While she conducts research on the not-yet-known monster, Grimcutty gains momentum as she visibly becomes more anxious and fearful of the horrific information read. When Brandon emerges with a knife, we might expect him to attack the object of his terror, but he instead stabs his mother right in the gut.

This twisted opener establishes a truly unsettling tone, expertly dropping its viewers into the midst of the conflict. Unfortunately, this introductory scare already solidified itself as one of the more unpredictable inciting incidents in the film. Nothing that follows compares to this horror.

The movie was loaded with the promise of jump scares that might have delivered on the bubbling anticipation to be scared out of our seats. Tension builds in some ways. The usual relaxation associated with ASMR audio becomes a goosebump-inducing whisper that audiences won’t be able to forget. Any ounce of hinted terror, however, was overshadowed by Grimcutty’s loudly projected message for its viewers. You can’t escape the social media allegories for some reason!

Ross, nevertheless, begins his premise of the Internet meme from hell with interesting and intellectual motifs that might fly under your radar. From the protagonist, Asha Chaudhry (Sara Wolfkind), a YouTube influencer who specializes in ASMR content creation, to the Mommy Blogger who needs to take a serious chill pill, the movie’s characterization shifts the genre in a smart manner.

In a scene displaying one of Asha’s ASMR videos, dolls are crushed under moving tires. This foreshadows her family’s eventual succumbing to the pressures and anxieties surrounding social media and internet culture. Utilizing the parents of Asha, Amir (Usman Ally) and Leah Chaudhry (Shannyn Sossamon), Ross shifts these surveilling-obsessed entities into the actual antagonists of the film. In an attempt to protect their children from the meme that grows faster than they can keep up with, the victims turn to villains as their anxiety and voyeurism become the genesis of Grimcutty’s power over their children.

Alas, Grimcutty’s scares are overshadowed by over-explanation, preaching instead of inviting us to put the pieces of this curious creature together. Without so much “on the nose” exposition, I might have left the film feeling more in awe, rather than feeling as if I had left a class lecture.

For every satirical aspect, scream trigger, and foreshadowing trope that gave way to the redeeming qualities that existed prior, they were quickly overridden by the abrupt ending. In a concluding monologue that seeks to wrap up the loose ends, Asha explicitly states her advice, encouraging kids to be honest with their parents about their online activity while relieving parents that fall short of keeping up with every last internet trend. To adolescents and adults that struggle to teeter the tightrope of respectable parental snooping and ornery teenage behavior, she shares an openhearted portrayal of the imperfections of humanity that we can’t desert.

The Grimcutty resolution was an experience similar to adolescent suppers when our parents forced us to finish our vegetables before we could leave the dining room table. (Cue flashbacks to the infamous cauliflowers that terrorized my childhood existence.) If the movie trusted its audience more in collecting the thematic goods, there could be space to discover even deeper horrors within the depths of online culture. Instead, the spoon-feeding approach kills the thrills and the fun.

Grimcutty comes to Hulu Oct.10.