Pod

Pod (2015) is a lean American horror-thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Director Mickey Keating, known for squeezing dread out of tiny budgets, builds it around indie-horror mainstay Larry Fessenden.

Ed and his messed-up sister Lyla drive out to check on their brother Martin, a discharged soldier battling schizophrenia alone in a remote house by a frozen lake. The trigger is a frantic voicemail: Martin swears he's trapped something in the basement and locked it down there. What starts as a family trying to talk a sick man off a ledge curdles into a nightmare where you can't tell who's unwell — or whether anything is really down those stairs.

Seventy-eight minutes of tightening claustrophobia, snow outside the windows, three actors in one house. The film runs on uncertainty, not money. It's for fans of chamber-piece indie horror who can stomach an ending that hands out no tidy answers. Stream Pod (2015) online on iFILM.