It’s the best thing when you stumble upon a pleasant surprise where one wasn’t expected, which was how I felt about Paul Soter’s Dark Circles (currently streaming on Tubi).

The movie is a horror/thriler about a couple (Johnathon Schaech and Pell James) who move to a new house in the country.

Part of the reason they do so is because they recently had a new baby, and want a place to bring him up, though to say that things don’t go quite as planned would be the understatement of the decade.

What makes this movie work is that on the surface it doesn’t do anything other movies of a similar bent haven’t done before though what makes it exceptional is that it takes what you expect, and turns it on it’s head, doing so with a surprising degree of degree of subtlety you don’t often see in a first time director.

Though what I enjoyed most about it is how plausible it actually is, in the sense that most horror or thriller movies – even the better ones – there’s always a kernel of implausibility from which there’s comfort because everyone knows there’s no such thing as an unkillable, machete-wielding maniac.

The terrors of Dark Circles though? They hide a little closer to home.