The Arbors (2020)

The Arbors | 1.5/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 7/19/2025

I’ve been trying to get through my Letterboxd Watchlist recently. There’s some really great films on there (a review coming next week about one of them) and there’s some real stinkers. Some of the bad ones are there on purpose (I’ve been eyeing some that fit my partner’s 2000s Gothic Action list), but other ones are there because I was suckered by a good poster. For the life of me I don’t know why this was sitting in my list. I don’t remember adding it, none of my Letterboxd mutuals had logged it and for the life of me, I can’t think of having heard about it. When deciding what was on the docket this week I flipped through my infinite backlog and decided to land here. Knock it off the list, try and get things cleared up, and see something new in the process.

The Arbors is a film about a loner named Ethan (Drew Matthews) who works for a locksmith on a dead-end third shift. He yearns for the simpler times when he and his little brother, Shane (Ryan Davenport), used to spend all their time together, before Shane got married and had a child. Over the course of the film a spiderlike creature Ethan finds escapes into the world, and begins killing people who he has perceived to have wronged him—ranging from small offenses like the neighbor’s obnoxious son to larger ones like Shane’s daughter being an alleged reason Shane doesn’t have the same time for Ethan as he did in the past. The creature murders its way through Ethan’s personal problems, often with Ethan watching along in horror. The town isn’t big enough for this to go unnoticed, and eventually Ethan pins the whole thing on one of his coworkers, killing him in “self-defense” before anyone can ask any questions. At the end of the film we hear an extended version of a voicemail Ethan sent Shane, which explicitly says he would be willing to do something drastic to regain a semblance of their childhood again. The film finally ends with Ethan burning down his childhood home, along with the creature’s nest, the implication of the conclusion being that the creature wasn’t necessarily real, in a sort of Babadook-adjacent situation.

There are some ideas in this movie that land, and some that really don’t. To open, this is a really nice-looking film. The blood looks great, the editing is solid, and the film maintains a great visual atmosphere. If IMDB is to be believed, this film was made for only $25,000. This shows in a couple areas, notably in the lack of cast and the truly abysmal CG. The general quality of the cinematography this film has doesn’t look like something made for such a tight budget at all, and I have to credit writer/director Clayton Witmer for that one. But what’s regrettable is there are multiple moments when we really could have done with something of a tighter edit. Slow doesn’t automatically make something good, and good doesn’t automatically excuse really ugly CG. There’s truly no reason for this to have been a two-hour-long film, especially with how little dialog is present in it.

I like a movie you need to unpack; I don’t have any issues with the idea of a more obtuse story. I just feel like this doesn’t manage to deliver on the implications that we build over the course of the film. Another couple tweaks of the script, or more likely a small cash influx to expand on some of the ideas, and this would have been something truly great.

When I was loading this up I couldn’t help but see reviews for how long the film was, but I tend to ignore those because if the film is properly paced, the runtime doesn’t bug me. Frankly, we’re really close here, but the domino effect of bad CG, overly obfuscated plot, and questionable acting choices from some of the cast will leave most viewers wanting. If I had realized this was the director’s first foray into feature length films I might have even felt differently, but in my attempt to go in blind, I intentionally didn’t look into what it turned out to have been. I would still recommend watching it, because if there’s good in the world, Clayton will have this marked on his Wikipedia page as a bit of a shaky start to a great career. The bones are here, and with a little more money and experience I know he’s going to make big things happen.