Knuckleball

What distinguishes Knuckleball from other thrillers involving children is the seeming reality of the peril portrayed.

Knuckleball does not flutter; its pace and tone is lean, mean and eerie. Luca Villacis plays the home-alone little hero, a Rambo MacGyver Jr. in the making. Not all the kid’s ingenuity and wits are plausible, though, and a late-plot throw-in is a bit much. Still, there’s Ironside and enough cold-weather tension to make Knuckleball a swing-and-hit deal.

For the most part, this is a tautly constructed exercise in suspense, set among striking-looking snowbound fields and farmhouses. It’s a vivid slice-of-life, even before the literal slicing begins.

Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.

Its premise may not be particularly original. But with it, Knuckleball could still have made for an effective movie, a horror film that’d also have doubled as a meditation on family. In actuality, however, Knuckleball ends up falling into a subcategory of horror films that I like to call “music-dependent.” Take away Michelle Osis and David Arcus’ scary-sounding score, in other words, and the film’s myriad flaws become woefully apparent.