It Feeds (2025) Review

Relax! This It Feeds (2025) review is spoiler free, and only contains the plot's premise, plus story details covered in the trailer and in the early part of the movie.

Low-budget horror isn’t always fun. But, when it is, it tends to be fun in a kind of silly, sloppy way – producing movies that have little on their mind more than to use their limited means to entertain, shock, or disgust, with few pretensions to being a ‘good’ movie.

It Feeds (2025) is clearly low-budget horror. And it’s most certainly fun. But, more importantly, It Feeds is good – a tight, engaging demon yarn that takes a well-trodden genre trope and spins out something that feels fresh and vital.

The film centres on a psychiatrist, Cynthia (Ashley Greene) and her daughter Jordan (Ellie O’Brien). From the opening scene, we learn Cynthia is more than your average shrink – she has clairvoyant tendencies, available off-menu for those looking to work through trauma through a less conventional avenue.

Yet it’s established early on that this less publicised side of Cynthia’s practice comes at a sometimes alarming personal cost.

In that first scene, for instance, she dives into a client’s mind to learn his troubles stemmed from an experience with his high-school coach. After ‘entering’ his mind – that, while she’s there, becomes as real to Cynthia as the real one she inhabits – she sees the man in boyhood form, imprisoned in a cage and watched over by the hulking, sinister form of the coach. After attempting to coax the boy to freedom, the spectre of the coach gets violent, smashing a glass which cuts her arm. When Cynthia returns to the relative safety and normalcy of her office, the cut is right there – underlining the real-world danger of her gift.

Twilight alum Ashley Greene plays Cynthia Winstone.

Jordan serves as Cynthia’s assistant and mentee, and – though she doesn’t, at the movie’s outset, share her mother’s gift – both her mother and father had it, and it’s implied it could be hereditary.

It Feels makes no secret around its influences and inspirations – it shares more than just a similar name and premise to 2014’s It Follows, for instance) and the film is lit and coloured in a way that’s reminiscent of the early Insidious films. Shot, too – director Chad Archibald’s slow, creeping camerawork and jump scares feel ripped straight out of the Wan playbook, and much of the motifs and iconography (doors, in particular) share that franchise’s visual style. Yet it’s crucial to note that It Feeds never feels like a knock-off or a cash in – it’s playing in a certain sandbox, sure, but having plenty of its own fun.

Ellie O'Brien stars as Jordan Winstone, Cynthia's daughter and assistant.

The plot’s key catalyst is when 14-year-old Riley Harris (Shayelin Martin) turns up, unannounced, at Cynthia’s office. Clearly distraught, Riley begs to be let in, but when Jordan speaks to her in an initial assessment, it’s clear the teenager’s issue goes beyond repressed trauma. She’s dealing with some kind of demon, an entity she claims is feeding off her. Cynthia, entering the room, sees this entity, before Riley’s father arrives and intervenes, whisking her away. (Incidentally, I couldn’t initially place the actor playing Riley’s dad, Randall Harris – he’s one of those actors that seemed to have been in everything during the 2000s, but his name totally escaped me. Turns out it’s Shawn Ashmore, whose CV spans TV staples as diverse as Animorphs and The Boys, genre films such as The Ruins (2008), plus the Darren Lynn Bousman flicks Mother’s Day (2010) and The Barrens (2012); although the role he’s best known for is, surely, Bobby Drake/Iceman in the X-Men films.)

THIS guy!!!

Anyways, the encounter leaves the pair – especially Cynthia – rattled. And, while Jordan is desperate, from a moral standpoint, to take the girl’s case, Cynthia refuses. With good reason – it’s revealed Jordan’s father (and Cynthia’s husband) died after getting involved with a demon case recently, and such entities aren’t just beyond the clairvoyant’s remit and capabilities – they’re simply too strong.

While It Feeds (2025) clearly draws inspiration from the Insidious and Conjuring franchises, it does so in a way that builds on that style and those themes, rather than feeling derivative of them.

Again, to anyone who’s seen Smile (2022) or The Boogeyman (2023) – both films involving psychiatrists, in which the action is invoked by a patient introducing a malevolent entity that infects the psychiatrist and their loved ones – will have seen this setup before. But, what It Feeds might lack in originality, it makes up for in pacing, excitement, and exposition – putting all the cards on the table and starting the game, without ever getting mired in its own lore in any way that detracts from the storytelling.

What unfolds – after Jordan sets out to track Riley down and help her, against her mother’s wishes – is a film that entertains not in the way of the archetypal low-budget horror we defined earlier, but with a crisp, concise, and (naturally, given the budgetary limitations imposed) stripped-back approach. The script is economical, with every snatch of dialogue and scene moving the story along. The performances – particularly that of Julian Richings, who I loved in Wrong Turn (2003) and Anything for Jackson – are mostly strong enough to carry the film, and Juno Rinaldi’s Agatha adds a sprinkling of comic relief to the movie’s midsection. Yet, perhaps most importantly, the film – while never threatening to be seriously terrifying – has some genuinely scary moments. The creature work is good; the jump scares are decent enough. But ultimately, without Greene and O’Brien’s performances selling the mother-daughter bond, we wouldn’t care for the characters – and none of it would work. It’s that surprisingly strong emotional anchor at the film’s heart – that gets us feeling for the characters and emotionally invested in their plight – that carries It Feeds.

The mother-daughter dynamic between Greene and O'Brien's characters helps glue the movie together.

So if you’re on the fence about whether to order this one, rest assured – this is no empty-calorie schlock. Tuck in, pig out, and enjoy every morsel. It Feeds may not be fine dining, but there’s still plenty for you to dig your teeth into!

Got a craving for more deliciously demonic horror? Talk to Me (2022), Demons (1985), and Malum (2023) should all fit the bill. Bon appetit!