Movie Review: IT FEEDS

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 18th, 2025 / 02:37 AM

IT FEEDS movie poster | © 2025 Falling Forward Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Ashley Greene, Ellie O’Brien, Juno Rinaldi, Mark Taylor, Julian Richings, Shawn Ashmore, Brooklyn Marshall, Shayelin Martin, Dov Tiefenbach
Writer: Chad Archibald
Director: Chad Archibald
Distributor: Falling Forward Films
Release Date: April 18, 2025 (theatrical and digital)

We meet Cynthia Winstone (Ashley Greene) in the middle of what seems to be a nightmare. We’re in an empty schoolroom, with menacing words printed on the blackboard and papers and books tossed around haphazardly.

However, it turns out Cynthia is at work – inside the mind of her client Larry (Dov Tiefenbach). Now an adult, Larry is still suffering from childhood trauma, and Cynthia is trying to help him confront it.

Cynthia, we soon learn, is a psychotherapist who is also a psychic therapist. She and her teen daughter Jordan (Ellie O’Brien) try to carefully screen clients to ensure that they don’t mistakenly offer Cynthia’s more esoteric services to skeptics.

Then a frantic young girl, Riley (Shayelin Martin), pounds on the door. She has strange scars on her arms. Riley heard about Cynthia from Cynthia’s friend Agatha (Juno Rinaldi) and insists that she needs immediate help.

We, Cynthia and Jordan can see that Riley indeed requires assistance – she is accompanied by a monstrous demon, only visible to the psychically gifted, who is feeding off the child.

But then Riley’s father Randall (Shawn Ashmore) barges in, insists they don’t need anything from anyone, and wrestles his daughter out the door.

In a lot of films of this general description, what happens next would be that Cynthia would leap to Riley’s aid. That’s not what happens in IT FEEDS.

Up to this point, IT FEEDS is very slightly reminiscent of INSIDIOUS but winds up using its narrative tools in a different way.

Instead, writer/director Chad Archibald has something trickier in mind. There are plenty of twists on multiple levels, including one that’s in plain sight all along but that we don’t guess at until it arrives.

There is a real sense of urgency in the proceedings. Archibald does well with jump scares and sets them up so that they are all legitimate. Likewise, he arranges his mythology so that it doesn’t require massive exposition, while allowing for big environmental changes.

Cinematographer Jeff Maher skillfully lights locations so that they appear to be dark and shadowy, yet we can still easily see the action.

Greene, Ashmore, O’Brien, and Martin are all suitably distraught and determined in their own ways. Rinaldi provides some comedic moments while eliciting sympathy as Agatha, and Julian Richings is effective in his scene as a retired physician.

IT FEEDS is both clever and creepy, a satisfying combination.

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