Single mother and recovering addict Jess (Rainey Qualley) gets locked in her cupboard in this Christian thriller they should have called Satanic Panic Room.

Disturbia director D.J. Caruso takes another Hitchockian premise (vulnerable woman gets trapped in pantry) and serves up another helping of dry goods, with a hefty side of Christian propaganda. The 90-minute flick benefits from its commitment to keeping the camera in the room with Jess, but lacks the dynamism that gives locked-door thrillers like Panic Room or Green Room room to breathe.

Instead the director (along with writer Melanie Toast) fixates on religious imagery literally as subtle as a nail through the hand, as the purgatorial protagonist converts her pantry into a vestry. Bibles conveniently filled with cash, temptations from drug pushers, and a painfully extended metaphor about rotten apples (“They’re bad, they’re not worth saving.”) consistently core out the film’s tension.

The 2022 picture proves mostly engaging but increasingly grim, going to frankly comical lengths to put Jess’s young children in danger by having a child molester (Vincent Gallo) break into the house. The humourless execution is at odds with the pulpy plot developments and preposterous revelations about the construction of the house, whose bathroom floor appears to be made out of cling film.

Qualley does her best with the dispassionate material but is encumbered by having to mumble Bible passages aloud. Jess has been trapped an entire day before she thinks to investigate the ceiling of her tiny enclosure, perhaps the movie’s most inadvertently incisive indictment of the Bible-basher’s constrictive lack of curiosity.