Child (2026) Review
Child (2026) Review
With their young son running out of time, Anne and Greg are willing to sacrifice everything for one last chance to save him. But after crossing an unforgivable moral line, they find themselves trapped in a nightmare where every choice demands an even greater price.
Neshvad was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2023 for The Red Suitcase, a tense drama about a teenage Iranian girl fleeing an arranged marriage. Child marks his first feature, which asks a question with no comfortable answer: what would any parent do, and where would they stop, to save a dying child?
Child stars César Award winner Malik Zidi (Oxygen), Brigitte Urhausen (Fils), Lydia Indjova (Sunny Beach), Anne Klein (The Roaming) and Dmytro Yaroshenko (L’été de Jahia).
How far would you go to save someone you love? It is a question that horror cinema has explored countless times, but in Child, writer-director Neshvad takes that familiar premise and pushes it into some deeply uncomfortable territory. This is a dark, creepy and frequently surprising piece of horror that begins as a slow burn before gradually revealing just how monstrous desperation can become.
Having its World Premiere in the First Feature strand of the 2026 Raindance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature, Child has already attracted some strong early reactions. Filmhounds Magazine awarded it four stars, praising how “Neshvad pushes the boundaries of horror cinema focused on grief, love, and desperation with this twisty, unpredictable, fantastical horror”, while Warped Perspective described it as maintaining “a very humane, character-focused approach throughout its bizarre literal and metaphorical journey.”
And that humanity is important, because beneath the horror, Child is really a film about love, grief, guilt and the lengths to which people will go when faced with the possibility of losing someone precious to them.
Anne (Brigitte Urhausen) and Greg (Malik Zidi) are the parents of a seriously ill boy who travel from Luxembourg to an unnamed and increasingly mysterious location, expecting to find a clinic that might offer their child a chance of survival. Instead, what they discover is considerably more sinister.
Neshvad wisely keeps his cards close to his chest. Child is a genuine slow burn, revealing information sparingly and allowing an atmosphere of uncertainty and unease to build. We know something isn’t right, but precisely what that something might be remains tantalisingly out of reach. Eventually, Anne and Greg find themselves at a seemingly abandoned old house in the woods, where the film begins to shift gears and the real horror starts to emerge.
Hidden within the caves is a sinister operation involving vivisections performed on donors, transforming what initially appears to be a desperate search for medical help into something altogether more nightmarish. Then Lydia (Lydia Indjova), another mother armed with a gun and determined to find her missing daughter, enters the equation, adding yet another unpredictable ingredient to an already volatile situation.
There are moments when Child recalls the grim human exploitation of Hostel, while its increasingly unsettling domestic environment and eruption of violence brought to mind the more recent Barbarians. However, these comparisons merely provide reference points rather than suggesting that Neshvad is simply retracing well-worn genre territory. There is enough going on here to give Child its own identity. And thank goodness for that.
At a time when horror can sometimes feel frustratingly formulaic, Child is refreshingly short, sharp and to the point. It doesn’t hang around unnecessarily, nor does it feel the need to spoon-feed its audience every detail. Instead, it keeps peeling back another layer of its increasingly disturbing premise, leaving us wondering just how much worse things can possibly get. Quite a bit worse, as it turns out.
What makes the film particularly effective is that its monsters aren’t confined to the darkness lurking outside. The real monsters can be found within the characters themselves — in the wounds they carry, the guilt they harbour and the terrible choices they are prepared to make when love becomes desperation. That gives Child a surprisingly human heart beneath all the darkness.
It is creepy, grim and atmospheric, but above all it is unpredictable, which is exactly what I want from a horror movie. Rather than offering up another generic collection of familiar scares, Child keeps throwing unexpected developments at us and refuses to settle into a comfortable rhythm.
It is an unexpected delight and one that deserves to be seen far beyond its festival run. Hopefully its forthcoming theatrical release will give it the opportunity to find the wider audience it deserves, even among those who might normally be reluctant to venture into the world of subtitled horror.
Because sometimes the best horror films are the ones that make you think you know where they’re going before gleefully dragging you somewhere considerably darker. Child is one of those films.
Child will be in UK cinemas from 2nd October
