'Don’t Let Them Out' Director Lila McLaughlin Finds Psychological Dread in Family Secrets and Desert Isolation

 

Review:

'Don’t Let Them Out'  

Director Lila

 McLaughlin Finds

Psychological Dread

 

in Family Secrets and 

Desert Isolation

Broke (Bonnie Root), emotionally fragile and in trouble in Lila McLaughlin’s “Don’t Let Them Out” (Courtesy Photo)

Lila McLaughlin’s “Don’t Let Them Out” announces a filmmaker with a genuine eye for unsettling atmosphere, emotional unease and slow-building psychological dread. As her feature directorial debut, it is an ambitious first effort from a writer-director who understands that the most effective horror does not always come from what is seen, but from what remains buried beneath a family’s history.

Running 88 minutes, “Don’t Let Them Out” follows a woman who arrives at a remote desert property she has inherited from her family. Broke (Bonnie Root), emotionally fragile and weighed down by crushing debt, she hopes to sell the house, put her past mistakes behind her and build a new life. Instead, she is pulled into a frightening mystery involving horrifying family secrets, disturbing visions and an increasingly unstable sense of reality.

As she begins to uncover the property’s sinister history, she is forced to question whether she is being haunted by something real or unraveling under the weight of trauma. McLaughlin wisely places the audience in that same uncomfortable position. Is the house cursed? Is this woman losing her mind? Or are the family’s darkest secrets finally demanding to be confronted?

McLaughlin makes excellent use of the desert setting, turning its vast openness into a source of isolation and dread. There is seemingly nowhere to hide and nowhere to go, while the family home becomes a repository for buried memories, inherited guilt and generational pain. Cinematographer Trey Betts gives the landscape an eerie, sun-bleached texture that serves the film’s psychological-horror ambitions particularly well.

The patchy, uneven quality of “Don’t Let Them Out” is largely forgivable—perhaps even welcome, to a degree—because it contributes to the film’s raw, homemade horror sensibility. Its modest scale, occasional pacing problems and rough technical edges might have worked as part of a deliberately scrappy independent vision.

But that generosity only goes so far.

The film’s most significant weakness is Bonnie Root’s performance in the central role. The problem is not the character, who is written with enough emotional trauma, financial desperation and psychological instability to make for a compelling horror protagonist. Root, however, too often feels muted and emotionally distant, without the range needed to carry the film as its suspense escalates. A stronger performance could have grounded the growing paranoia, deepened the supernatural ambiguity and made the descent into family trauma considerably more affecting.

Instead, Root’s performance makes the film’s rough edges more conspicuous. With a more dynamic and emotionally available actor at its center, McLaughlin’s homemade horror approach might have transformed some of that unevenness into texture rather than limitation.

Still, “Don’t Let Them Out” succeeds as a calling card for McLaughlin. Her instincts as a horror filmmaker are clear, particularly in the way she uses atmosphere, isolation and family trauma, along with the unnerving suggestion that the past is not something we simply leave behind. Sometimes it follows us. Sometimes it waits for us.

The film is not fully polished, but its ambition is unmistakable. McLaughlin has made a psychological horror debut with enough mood, conviction and promise to make whatever she directs next worth watching.

“Don’t Let Them Out” is currently screening in a limited theatrical run through September 22 and will be released by Buffalo 8 on digital platforms on September 22, 2026.

“Lila McLaughlin delivers a strong feature directorial debut, proving she has a sharp eye for psychological horror, tension, and unsettling family secrets.”

— Lapacazo M. Sandoval, AmNews Curtain Raiser

CREW

Director:                      Lila McLaughlin

Producer:                     Lila McLaughlin, Bonnie Root

Cast:                             Bonnie Root, Louis Ferreira, Emily Rios

Cinematographer:       Trey Betts