Plenty of horror movies are about summoning something. Fewer are about being desperate enough to call anyway.
Bloody Disgusting has the exclusive debut of the trailer for Family, the feature debut of writer and director Benjamin Finkel. The footage does not lead with a monster. It leads with a house where somebody is dying and a kid who has decided she can do something about it.
A Kid, a Dying Father, and a Bad Answer
Set in the summer of 2002, the story follows 11-year-old Johanna (Cameron Dawson Gray, credited at the film’s premiere as Lucinda Lee Dawson Gray) as her father Harry (Ben Chaplin) gets sicker and her mother Naomi (Ruth Wilson) disappears into the work of caring for him. Johanna is left alone in the middle of it. So she asks for help from something she believes will be good. The trailer suggests she gets an answer. It does not suggest she gets the one she wanted.
Naomi Is Not Being Sold as a Villain
Wilson is the reason this footage keeps getting passed around and it is easy to see why. She is doing something here that reads as exhaustion first and something worse second. Naomi is not sold as a villain. She is a woman running out of everything at once, and the trailer lets that ambiguity sit without resolving it. Whether the house is haunted or the family is simply coming apart is a question the footage seems happy to leave open.
That is where Family looks most uncomfortable and most interesting. Grief that starts before the death does. A child with no way to help and nobody paying attention to her. The pull of believing something invisible might fix what the adults in the room cannot. Horror has been externalizing that kind of helplessness for a long time and it works because nobody outgrows it.
Allan Corduner rounds out the cast. Wilson also serves as an executive producer. Finkel has said the film grew out of his own childhood experience with his father’s cancer, which is probably why the sick-parent material in the trailer does not play like set dressing.
Family premiered in the Midnighters section at SXSW in March 2024, where reviews singled out Wilson’s performance and the difficulty of the subject matter. It runs roughly 95 minutes.
Where and When to Watch
According to Bloody Disgusting, Vertical will release Family in limited theaters and on digital rental platforms September 25, 2026. The premise is the hook and the trap at the same time. Anyone who has sat in a house with a dying parent already knows exactly what Johanna wants, which makes watching her ask for it much harder than a haunted house.
