Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Grimcutty’ on Hulu, Where IRL Anxieties And Overreacting Parents Fuel An Online Monster’s Manifest Form

The Hulu Original Grimcutty was written and directed by John William Ross, who’d previously helmed an episode in Bite Size Halloween, the streamer’s anthology of horror shorts. What’s Grimcutty? Well, it’s a monster that feeds on the anxieties that typically cloud young peoples’ relationships with their parents. “It’s OK to not understand everything that’s going on with us!” one teen reassures mom and dad in Grimcutty. But what the parents heard was “My child’s internet and social media activity and unhealthy reliance on screen time is causing a rash of local stabbings.”

GRIMCUTTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In Grimcutty, it will become the task of high schooler Asha (Sara Wolfkind) and her brainy little brother Kamran (Callan Farris) to save themselves and their fellow area young people from an epidemic of mass hysteria that’s infected parents and school administrators, the same hysteria that has fueled the emergence of an evil being who manipulates kids into inducing harm. But before any of that happens, let’s meet a mommy blogger. Melinda Jaynes (Alona Tal of Seal Team) keeps her young son under lock and key as she scours the latest toxic news cycles online. Posts to her blog, like “My son is never bored – here’s why that’s a problem” or the promotion of a “detox box” for families to wean themselves off devices are replete with triggering language for people like Asha and Kamran’s parents, Amir (Usman Ally, Suits) and Leah (Shannyn Sossamon). With their anxieties sufficiently stoked, the adults put it back on the kids in the form of suspicion, until nobody’s happy and the entire community has become one big detox box.

“New, disturbing reports of teens gathering together to try the Grimcutty challenge, watch each other cut themselves, and even engage in bizarre group cutting rituals,” a breathless news report announces, and Asha is having no luck convincing her parents that what began as the kind of dangerous trending topic parents love to fear has transformed into something very sinister and very, very, IRL. We’re talking oversized spooky head IRL, with claws twice the size of a lion. More than once, her parents’ agitated state over trying to manage the unknowns in their children’s lives causes Grimcutty to appear and advance on Asha; more than once, the same behavior by other parents has caused their kid to be harmed or even harm someone else. And of course, the kids in town are more level headed about all of this than the parental units they’re always trying to “train” to not worry.

With the help of Kamran and her new friend Cassidy (Tate Moore), a loner girl from school who follows her ASMR-themed YouTube channel, Asha manages to link the both the spread of Grimcutty’s influence and the bizarre wellness speak their parents spout – “Reclaim my focus game and cut my screen time in the meantime” – back to Melinda the mommy blogger, who by now has built a locked and padded cell for her little boy. (Curious how she didn’t write a blog post about that decision.) Amir has fallen under the spell of online toxicity, and is still adamant that medicating his children is the only answer, but at least Leah comes around to what Asha and her allies are selling: Grimcutty can be made or broken by our actions toward each other. So be nice, encourage each other to listen, and don’t doom scroll after midnight, lest you want to manifest an online monster.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? By most accounts, the 2018 film Slender Man was awful. But it’s that font of user-generated creepypasta horror that Grimcutty draws from, that the surge of interest in an online challenge could cause the physical manifestation of evil. Also riffing on that idea, and also becoming a better and scarier film than either Grim or Slender in the process, is the consistently underrated Empty Man from 2020.

Performance Worth Watching: As Asha, newcomer Sara Wolfkind is great as a teen trying to navigate the evolving relationship she has with her parents and keep everyone sane in the process. And Tate Moore deserved a few more scenes as Asha’s rebellious new pal Cassidy.

Memorable Dialogue: It’s Cassidy who has to break it to her new pal when Asha is blustering about her inner Zen as her face makes an expression like chomping down on tinfoil. “You don’t strike me as Zen-like at all. A Zen-like person doesn’t have to hide in their room and meditate every time something goes wrong. A Zen-like person could be in the middle of one of the most fucked up, insane situation ever, and still find inner peace. That’s what Zen is.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Once it’s established that parents are over-policing their childrens’ internet use to egregious levels, so much so that Cassidy says “they can’t just take our phones away – that’s fascist,” Grimcutty expends quite a bit of the energy it created during a sodden and overlong midsection that basically amounts to Asha hunting down an unsecured laptop in order to conduct some research online. And that aimlessness is unfortunate, because it robs the two or three decent sequences of the Grimcutty beast stalking its prey from generating any vitality. Grim isn’t gory. And even when it catches someone, there are no grisly death blows. But there is some chilling suspense in watching its hulking form – spindly legs and arms, bulbous and enormous head; sometimes, Grimcutty resembles Felonious Gru crossed with It – move through the chaotic space of a beery high school party in pursuit of Asha, a hulking form that only she can see. A brimful of that suspense might have worked better than yet another scene of someone checking their comments and socials on a computer.

It’s also to Grimcutty’s credit that its cast of young actors are uniformly adept at making the kids and their world as it exists underneath and around the margins of parental guardrails the most interesting thing in the film. Sure, the monster eventually starts causing enough mayhem that it can’t be ignored by anyone. But the way all the young people accept the new meme, promote it, and ultimately promulgate its dangers as a form of entertainment is enough of a mirror on the TikTok’ing of our culture that it smarts with contemporary relevance.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s too long, and a character checking a phone or their email will never be as compelling to watch as Hollywood wants it to be. But Grimcutty has a strong cast in its favor, and derives some scary-adjacent chills from setting its main baddie loose to grimly grab at teens in trouble.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges