It’s gotta be tough to break into filmmaking when your dad is one of the greats, but that’s what Destry Allyn Spielberg has done with Please Don’t Feed the Children. Obviously, she’s the daughter of Steven Spielberg, and let’s be honest, there will be those who write her off immediately as a nepo-baby cashing in on her last name. But her debut is a solid effort that initially has you thinking it will follow in her famous father’s style, Spielberg instead goes her own direction by refusing to stick with any one genre. The post-apocalyptic pandemic thriller is as much a horror movie as it is a road trip film and a coming-of-age story, anchored by a creepy lead performance by Michelle Dockery.
Set in a dystopian society in the not-too-distant future, Please Don’t Feed the Children begins in the wake of a viral outbreak that has decimated the adult population. With the disease blamed on kids, they are captured and herded into brutal camps. But there are also roving packs of orphans avoiding capture, most of them committing petty crimes just to survive, when they aren’t looking for a fabled haven where all children are safe.
Zoe Colletti, Regan Aliyah, Andrew Liner, Josh Melnick, Dean Scott Vazquez, and Emma Meisel play a group of fugitive orphans who, after a botched shoplifting turns deadly, break into the worst possible home. Because of her long stint on Downton Abbey we’re sort of trained to expect refined and mannered characters from Dockery, and initially it seems this will be another one. But she proves to be quite the crafty, nasty villain, tricking the gang until she has them subdued, locked away, and terrorized. When they start disappearing from their captivity one-by-one, they begin to realize that she’s keeping something far worse hidden away in her home.
There have been loads of behind-the-scenes issues that have plagued Please Don’t Feed the Children, which happens when you’ve got a shoestring production such as this. But Spielberg has shrugged all of that off and put together a film that, while grappling with an uneven and familiar screenplay by Paul Bertino, manages to keep up a good pace and deliver some intriguing conflict among the group, who don’t completely trust one another.
The always-reliable Giancarlo Esposito has a small role as a sheriff and a friend to Dockery’s character. Together, Esposito and Dockery bring invaluable gravitas, and it’s to Please Don’t Feed the Children‘s benefit to have them both in the final act. This is about as close as we get to Esposito playing a morally decent character lately. And that speaks to the dark, cynical outlook the film leaves you with because morality and decency seem to be rarities in this world. For Destry Allyn Spielberg, her debut shows enough promise that we can be confident this is the start of her filmmaking career and not the end.
Please Don’t Feed the Children opens on June 27th via Tubi.
