10 Best Horror Movie Performances Nobody Talks About

Everything about this 2018 psychological horror film is underrated. From the bleak setting to the Freudian influences to the utterly horrific puppet from which the film gets it’s name. Perhaps most underrated of all is already underappreciated actor Sean Harris’s performance as Philip.

Philip was a children’s puppeteer who was fired for unexplained reasons and later returned to his childhood home. Only living with his uncle, Maurice, a clearly unpleasant and vile individual, Philip tries to rid himself of a puppet known as Possum but continuously fails to do so. The puppet and film as a whole reads as a metaphor for trauma, and Harris is devastatingly sad in his role. Philip is so lonely in his world that he appears almost ghostlike, his only interactions with other human beings being ones of scorn and mistrust. Harris makes him pathetic, childlike and an embodiment of the desaturated and miserable world around him without ever straying into melodrama.

Yet for all the sympathy drawn from the audience, Harris still manages to make the audience unsure about Philip. Is he the reason why there is a missing boy in his hometown, and why was he fired? There are unsettling implications peppered throughout the film that suggest why, and they are equally as believable as Philip’s visions of the puppet. That’s the real magic of Harris’ performance: displaying a fragmented psyche in a way that is so delicate it could shatter at the slightest touch, but it never does – all we see is a broken and vulnerable man.