Review by Frank Plowright

In Columbiana the preacher’s wife has been missing for three days, and the community are understandably upset at little progress in finding her. Emmett Nahil discloses early that there’s more going on than the residents understand, as the local authorities have something they want to keep quiet. Conservative small town America in the midst of a crisis in 1979 isn’t the place to be different, never mind coming to terms with who you are, which makes life difficult for four friends, and that’s even before the Sheriff begins ramping up suggestions of satanic murder rituals.

The idea of friends sticking together and looking out for each other is well extrapolated by Nahil, as is the tedium of constantly having to stick up for being who you are. That’s set against a convincing background of the prejudice unfortunately lurking behind the lace curtains in so many places. It’s down to George Williams to evoke that claustrophobia visually, and his people and locations have a convincing presence. Let Me Out’s most manipulative character is an FBI agent dabbling in occult experiments, and he’s all the more skin crawling for the way Williams draws him as being so normal as to make him anonymous.

That’s part of the idea. In a small community it’s surprisingly easy to whip up fear and restrict freedom, and while this may be 1979, there are inescapable parallels in 2023. Nahil builds the story by switching between the manipulators and those affected, and eventually the list of convenient scapegoats for dirty deeds narrows right down. It’s a terrifying indictment of persecution. However, it would have been stronger still for dispensing with a rumbling subplot about unethical experiments that’s little more than sensationalism and sticking with the real world, or at least as it was in 1979. There’s more than enough fear and tension present to sustain the plot.

On the other hand, for some people the eventual intrusion of full blown satanic horror will be the justification and selling point, and it certainly leads to some righteous retribution. It also draws Let Me Out closer to the lucrative Stranger Things fanbase. After that, though, everything flatlines at the end.

Let Me Out differs from the standard action thrillers by offering a diverse cast, a slow build, and a clear sense of what’s going wrong. However, the way is eventually lost.