Cynefilms has announced that Child, a mystery suspense thriller directed by Oscar® nominee Cyrus Neshvad, will arrive in UK cinemas from 2 October.
At the centre of Child is a terrifying moral countdown: a young boy is dying, and his parents, Anne and Greg, are running out of time. In a last, desperate attempt to save their son, the couple travels across Europe in pursuit of an illegal organ transplant. But when the donor child’s mother discovers the truth, the operation collapses in violence—forcing Anne and Greg to flee into the night with the organ, and a grieving mother determined to make them pay.
A devastating car crash drives them deep into an isolated forest, where they take shelter in an abandoned rural refuge. Cut off from the world and hunted, they begin to sense an additional presence in the woods—something malevolent that feeds on fear, guilt, and the secrets they’re trying to outrun. As darkness closes in, Child tightens the screws on its central question: how far can love push you before it becomes something unrecognisable?
Neshvad has described Child as a horror story built on psychological truth—where tension is often felt more than seen, and where guilt becomes the film’s driving force. He has also spoken about drawing on personal experiences of displacement and early fear to shape the film’s emotional atmosphere, using horror as a way to explore the lasting echoes of lost innocence.
Child had its world premiere in the First Feature strand of the 2026 Raindance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature. Positioning itself in the tradition of elevated horror, Child uses dread not as spectacle, but as a sharp lens on a parent’s worst fear—what we will do to protect the ones we love, and what follows when we can’t live with the cost. The film stars César Award winner Malik Zidi (Oxygen), alongside Brigitte Urhausen (Fils), Lydia Indjova (Sunny Beach), Anne Klein (The Roaming) and Dmytro Yaroshenko (L’été de Jahia).
Child will be in UK cinemas from 2 October.
Image provided courtesy of Strike Media
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