A gay couple are trapped in a haunted Airbnb with their parents in an initially amusing but progressively exasperating genre mishmash

Writer-director Craig Johnson broke out with 2014’s spiky comedy drama The Skeleton Twins, a film that hit familiar Sundance indie beats but hit them better than most. He has struggled a little since, from annoying Woody Harrelson-led comedy Wilson to ho-hum gay high school romance Alex Strangelove, and so one can understand why Johnson might feel like a big swing in a different direction might make most sense.

It has led him to a script by Saturday Night Live writer Kent Sublette called The Parenting, a throwback supernatural comedy horror that tries to remind us of a time when these rambunctious concoctions were far more common. Think Beetlejuice in the 80s or The Frighteners in the 90s or the deeply underrated Housebound more recently, a high-energy rush of...