FAMILY FINALLY HAS A RELEASE DATE AND ITS NEW TRAILER MAKES PARENTS LOOK LIKE THE WORST THING IN THE HOUSE
- The Keeper
- Aug 26
- 2 min read
The most effective horror does not always need to make the home unsafe.
Sometimes it only needs to make the people inside it unrecognizable.
A new trailer has arrived for Family, the psychological horror film starring Ruth Wilson and Ben Chaplin, and after a long road from its 2024 SXSW premiere the movie is finally headed to U.S. audiences. Vertical is set to release the film in limited theaters and on digital rental platforms September 25, 2026.
Cameron Dawson Gray stars as Johanna, a young girl whose family has relocated while her seriously ill father, Harry, receives treatment. Her mother Naomi is consumed by his decline, leaving Johanna isolated inside a household already being hollowed out by fear. Desperate to save her father, Johanna reaches for something supernatural—a supposedly magical birdhouse meant to summon a good spirit.
Horror fans know the problem with invitations.
Something may answer.
The wording rarely matters to it.
The trailer leans into Johanna’s growing conviction that her parents are no longer safe and may actually be trying to kill her. Wilson is particularly well suited to this kind of material because she can make a perfectly ordinary expression feel fractionally wrong. Chaplin brings the opposite kind of unease: physical vulnerability that can suddenly read as menace when filtered through a terrified child’s perception.
And then there is the dog.
One of the trailer’s most immediately disturbing images is a family dog standing upright on its hind legs. It is a small piece of visual wrongness, but it gets at what Family appears to be doing best: taking familiar domestic details and shifting them just far enough that the brain starts rejecting the entire room.
The film is written and directed by Benjamin Finkel and originally premiered in SXSW’s Midnighter program in March 2024, where it received the Kickstarter NextGen Award. The delay between festival premiere and wider release could easily have buried a smaller horror film. Instead, the new trailer gives it a second arrival.
What makes Family interesting is the ambiguity underneath the supernatural setup. Is Johanna accurately seeing a malignant force consume her home, or are grief, illness and childhood terror changing the way she interprets the adults around her?
The best version of this movie will resist making that question too easy.
A creature can be frightening.
A child becoming genuinely uncertain whether her mother and father still love her is worse.
There is also something refreshing about a horror film willing to center fear through a child without automatically turning the child into the creepy object. Johanna is not the porcelain-faced omen standing at the end of a hallway. She is the person trapped inside the nightmare, trying to understand whether the adults who are supposed to protect her have become the threat.
Family runs 95 minutes and arrives September 25 in limited U.S. theaters and on digital rental platforms.
After more than two years between festival premiere and release, the movie finally gets its chance to leave the house.
Based on the trailer, Grimmhaus would advise keeping the dog where you can see it.
Comments