Into the Dark: They Come Knocking (2019)

June's episode in the Hulu anthology TV series Into the Dark "celebrates" Father's Day with a tale of a grieving family of a father and his two daughters, who had just lost their mother to illness. As a way of closure, the father decided it was a cool idea to take his two daughters for a road trip to a deserted spot literally in the middle of nowhere, where he claims he had proposed to his wife, and to release his late wife's ashes.

But since this is an Into the Dark episode, we know that something will go wrong. In this case, it is the appearance of some eerie looking kids dressed in hoods who come knocking on their caravan's door in the evening with threatening demands. The acting and initial build up to the story was good, and there were some genuine scary and creepy moments. These served to heighten the viewer's expectation for a rousing good old fashion terror ride. Unfortunately, as the source of the disturbances begin to manifest itself more, and our main characters get into all sorts of increasingly unlikely or bizarre situations, the episode began to fall apart. My main gripe here is that it gradually became apparent that the horror may not be as menacing as it was being made up to be, and that there was no proper explanation for the appearances of the kids. Who are they? Were they just hallucination? What were they after? What were all those missing people messages in the store about? None of the obvious questions were really answered at the end which just gives the while episode a "WTF" feeling and sense that we had wasted our time invested in it.

We are now nine episodes into the series, and there had been more misses than hits. In fact I think the earlier episodes had been more rewarding. I can only hope the remaining 3 episodes would help till the scale and make this series a winner.