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Frankenstein (2025)
One of the reasons Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been so richly relevant two hundred years later is because of her thought-provoking themes and concepts, which still prove potent with each new malleable reinterpretation from the newest creative caretaker. It’s the “be careful what you wish for” adage combined with man’s hubris and our self-destructive impulses to play with things we don’t fully understand. It’s also a monster story that asks us to reconsider the perception of who the monster may truly be, and under writer/director Guillermo del Toro, the answer is always and forever man himself. This isn’t a surprise from the same filmmaker who gave us Hellboy and The Shape of Water. The man identifies with the monsters more than other people. The man turned his astounding stop-motion animated Pinocchio movie into a deft Frankenstein allegory, so the famous story has been on his mind for quite some time. It’s been an obvious influence, and now that he’s gotten his chance on his own imprint, it’s hard not to see elements of del Toro’s other movies everywhere. It creates this bizarre echo chamber of creative influence where the movie can feel derivative at times even though the source material was an influence on those other del Toro works. It’s just the nature of finally tackling the influence later in his career. It reminds me of 2012’s John Carter, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ highly influential sci-fi series, and yet because it took 100 years to leap to the big screen, it couldn’t help but seem derivative of the same popular movies that were inspired by it. This is a convoluted way of saying del Toro’s Frankenstein is a much better Guillermo del Toro movie than a Frankenstein adaptation.
You probably know the story well enough to recite it yourself. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is obsessed with conquering death after his own mother’s demise in childbirth. He gathers the parts of criminals and dead soldiers to reanimate into a new being, a Creature (Jacob Elordi) of superhuman strength and regeneration who cannot die. Victor’s cruelty punishes the Creature and disowns it, setting the stage for a showdown between dysfunctional father and son and the havoc caused by recklessly playing God.
There are deliberate decisions that mitigate some of the more compelling characterization of the novel. With del Toro’s version, Victor is the clear-cut villain. There’s some setup given to his strict childhood where his domineering father (Charles Dance) would quiz him and physically abuse Victor if he failed to recite the correct answers to his medical questions. Dear bad dad was doing this, you see, out of a belief that good doctors need to know intuitively because any hesitation could cost lives. When we witness Victor abusing the Creature in the same manner, we’re meant to see the connection between abusive fathers confusing disappointment with defiance. In the original story, Victor abandons the Creature on the night of its birth and then it’s gone. In this version, Victor imprisons the Creature, keeps him chained, attempts to train him, grows frustrated, and then tries to destroy the evidence. That’s a little more diabolical than simple morning-after regrets. This Victor can also be viewed as a forefather of incels the way he projects his romantic feelings onto Elizabeth (Mia Goth) and then gets huffy when she doesn’t return them. There are other deaths later in the story that are directly attributed to the Creature that are now Victor’s doing, which continues to squeeze out moral ambiguity from Shelley’s novel. If the Creature is purely innocent and Victor is purely villainous, that makes the relationship between father and son, Creator and Creature, far less meaningful and layered. It’s so obvious that another character, in their literal dying words, says to Victor, “You are the real monster.” It all becomes an ongoing cycle of bad fathers and the Creature ultimately trying to reach forgiveness. Even if the Creature ultimately finds that, is this Victor even worthy of redemption?
Another significant feature of del Toro’s retelling is, how do I put this delicately, the inherent magnetism of the Creature, a.k.a. Sexy Frankenstein. Elordi (Saltburn) is a tall, lithe actor to begin with with classical Hollywood features, but there was a conscious choice to portray this figure in a certain light, a sexy light. You might find parts of you that are suddenly alive while watching the character onscreen. That’s why even though he’s a literal assembly of corpses the makeup effects are very minimal and less intentionally grotesque or monstrous. The delicate lines around his body make me think of a cross between the Engineers in Prometheus and the body paint of that Gotye music video “Somebody I Used to Know.” The gentle makeup is meant to further convey the Creature as a sensitive figure; granted, he’s also capable of ripping the jaw off a wolf. By swerving away from the Creature’s physical deformities, the movie is also inadvertently downplaying the isolation that he felt that led to such rage and resentment. Is this man that hideous that some good woman couldn’t love him as is? The movie is already presenting Elizabeth as someone who sees through to his gentle nature, and she certainly also seems more than a little attracted to what he’s got going on. This Sexy Frankenstein reconfirms del Toro’s penchant for identifying with the monster, the outcasts, the underdogs. However, Sexy Frankenstein also takes something away from the horror and cost of the creation if he’s just going to be another brooding, misunderstood Byronic hero. Still, there are definitely worse pieces of meat you could be watching, so enjoy monster sweethearts.
With all that being said, del Toro’s Frankenstein is still a sumptuously made and entertaining Gothic spectacle. The production design is immense and immersive with del Toro’s knack for perfect details to create such a lived-in sense of mood (never enough giant stone face edifices). I loved Victor’s models of human torsos that looked almost like ballet dancers at rest; granted, ballet dancers having their skin peeled back by dozens of hooks. I just wanted to spend as much time as possible soaking up these sets and this heightened Gothic realm. It’s the kind of world where Victor’s laboratory needs to be an opulent abandoned castle complete with a pit in the middle of the floor plan that goes through several floors to a sewar/aqueduct basement level. There’s even what appears to be a water slide out of the estate, and the Creature gets to escape it in the most fun way. The movie is gorgeous with del Toro’s signature orange/green color palette bathing his universe. Even if the story isn’t quite reaching the heights it could, the visuals are always sterling and inviting. There’s also a surprising amount of gore, which maybe shouldn’t have been that surprising. I don’t know if we needed as much of the Arctic framing device, which itself was structured as a series of letters in the novel. It’s a platform for del Toro to demonstrate the Creature’s physical prowess and get some quality big-screen bloodshed flowing. I don’t know if we needed to keep cutting back throughout the whole running time like it’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Regardless, if you’re a general fan of monster movies, there’s going to be plenty here to proverbially sink your teeth into and savor on that super Netflix budget.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gave birth to science fiction in 1818 and the James Whale movies from the 1930s gave birth to some of cinema’s most iconic and lasting images and influences. There’s quite a legacy for anyone who wants to put their own stamp on the material, so it helps that Guillermo del Toro has quite a legacy himself, a career built upon the dark recesses of a verdant imagination (I’ll always lament what could have been his version of The Hobbit movies, alas). His Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a classic del Toro film experience, from the impeccable technical qualities, to the celebration of the mythic and Gothic, to the sympathetic portrayal of the outsiders condemned by a society too square to accept them, and an unironic emotional undercurrent that can approach self-parody. It’s a little long, a little ungainly in its shape, and a little too simplistic with its themes and characterization, but it can also be fittingly transporting and romantic and easy to feel that swell even if it’s all too familiar. For my money, the best Frankenstein adaptation is still the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, flaws and all.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Death of a Unicorn (2025)
Unfortunately, this never became the glorious B-movie its premise promises, a monster movie with ghastly gore that also satirizes the rich business elites. Death of a Unicorn has enough appealing elements, from the father/daughter relationship between Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, to some ridiculous gore and kills, to impressive creature prosthetics to bring the unicorn to life (and death). The setup has Rudd and Ortega run over a unicorn in a secluded nature reserve on their way to meet dad’s boss. They discover the unicorn blood can be miraculously healing, which is a fortuitous discovery considering Rudd’s boss runs a pharmaceutical company. You can see where this goes, especially when you learn that there are more unicorns out there and they are not happy. It becomes a wily creature feature from there, with unicorns picking off the characters one-by-one as they try and escape. The satirical broadsides are a bit too broad, thus only really glancing in their pointed attacks that the people in charge of medical care are themselves venal and selfish. Got it. Much of the humor is related directly to the absurdity of watching a unicorn as a blood-thirsty monster. If you replaced the unicorn with, say, a yeti, would the situation still be amusing? Maybe, but I seriously doubt it. Death of a Unicorn could have been a little scarier, funnier, even freakier, and maybe carried through on the courage of its convictions.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Together (2025)
With co-dependency as its anchor metaphor, Together is a body horror movie asking the question how intimate you’d ever want to be with your beloved? It’s a relationship drama about two people that should probably break up and move on but are clinging to some sense that they need to stay. Real-life married couple Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) and Alison Brie (Horse Girl) play pretend couple Tim and Millie who relocate to the small-town countryside and come across a mysterious sinkhole belonging to an abandoned New Agey church, as one does. After Tim, in his desperation, drinks the water out of a pit that looks like it was designed by H.R. Giger, his body and mind are hijacked with the compulsion to be as close as possible with his long-time girlfriend. Now the two of them are fighting strange impulses, like swallowing one another’s hair, or trying to physically meld their bodies together. Can they learn more about their predicament and the history of this symbiosis before they are forced together forever?
Considering its premise, there is plenty of potential here for grandly gross body horror. There are certainly some squirm-worthy and disgusting moments of vivid imagery that could induce nightmares. I’m not even talking about the direct body horror moments. Seeing a man swallowing a majority of your ponytail in his sleep might make you gag like it did me. Things get more wild after an hour and stay that way to the end, as the couple has to thwart their bodies from literally fusing together. The sticky skin-to-skin, or eyeball-to-eyeball sequences are dreadfully unnerving, but the imagery of them literally being dragged by invisible forces across the ground to one another like literal magnets is less horrifying and more absurdly ridiculous. That’s the rub. There’s some terrific body horror grotesquery here, and writer/director Michael Shanks has a sneaky way with dread, building things to a monumental point and then cutting away. However, some of the other aspects of this curse come across as far goofier, like the aforementioned being dragged across the floor. For some it might come across as terrifying, the whole supernatural exaggeration of being out of control of your own body, but it reminded me of Tenet where it looked like characters were just rolling around on the ground in a supremely silly way when it was supposed to be “backwards time.” There are also some middling jump scares relating to Tim’s trauma with his parents that, I guess, is the explanation for why he has intimacy problems. Still, if you’re coming to Together for the outlandishly gross potential of its premise, there may be enough to sate your curiosity for macabre oddities.
Together is more a movie about a couple who should retire. There’s far more about the struggles and pains of this relationship than weird body horror. She wants to get married, he doesn’t. She wanted to move for a new job, and he did not. She wants to have regular sex, he hasn’t wanted to for months for unspecified reasons (unresolved childhood traumas?). The relationship is very one-sided and unlike 2019’s Midsommar, which was about a poor woman realizing it was time to kick her no-good boyfriend to the curb, or burn him alive via cult intervention, this movie is more about Millie wearing down Tim’s defenses. He’s connecting with her again but it’s through this metaphysical compulsion that he can’t fully explain. He’s expressing real physical interest but he’s still finding ways to reject her, which just drives her crazier. One minute they’re trying to resolve their intimacy issues, and the next they’re working together to slice their arms apart. There are some memorable discomforts, like having to physically dislodge after some vigorous yet impulsive bathroom stall sex. That sequence made me uncomfortable for several reasons. The film’s shock value and tone flirts with darker humor without committing. The final shot of the movie is also a bit silly, and while it achieves the articulation of the movie’s main theme, the concluding imagery is more like, “Oh, well, okay then.” It might even produce a few guffaws. It’s not quite the lasting image I think the filmmakers wanted to go out on. It made me think of Kevin Smith’s man-becomes-walrus horror film, Tusk, where it ends and you go, “Oh… well, they did it, all right.” Some things are better in theory than finally visualized where they come across as anticlimactic.
That’s the other thing with Together, it’s practically bludgeoning you with its obvious theme, having every other line relate back to codependency. Multiple times you will hear, “It would be better to separate now. It will just be harder the longer we wait.” Can you get how this will be applied in multiple contexts? These are characters that feel stuck. Get it? Franco and Brie have an easy-going chemistry and an innate ability to find the darker humor amidst all the body horror splicing. I might argue their chemistry is too good considering they’re supposed to be a couple that shouldn’t really stay together and have passed their relationship expiration date. I don’t think you should want them to stay together considering this relationship is killing the both of them, now very literally. I was surprised there wasn’t more combustion to how this complicates their interactions and mobility. If this is a relationship that has had its rocky points and toxicity, you would think something this unnatural and against their autonomy would produce some friction (no pun intended). I suppose you could examine the entire movie as an analysis of how easily people will subsume themselves in order to stay in something even they would admit isn’t healthy. I’m not going to pretend The Substance was subtle either, but that movie was more fable and mixing in its over-the-top elements with verve, rather than fitting them into a relationship dirge.
Right before its nationwide theatrical release, Together was accused of plagiarism by another filmmaker who approached Franco and Brie with a similar concept in 2020. Shanks has defended his film by saying he registered his first draft back in 2019, and the producers of Together, including Franco and Brie, have dismissed the claim. I haven’t read the competing script, nor do I pretend to be an insider on this matter, but it’s easy for me to see how this concept could have been independently generated by dozens of screenwriters and aspiring body horror gurus. It’s taking its theme and making it quite literal, forcing the challenged couple who shouldn’t be together to literally, physically, irrevocably be together. It’s all pretty straightforward, which makes Together a workable but limited body horror experiment. I liked it, as much as one can like a movie where characters have to forcibly unstuck their genitals, but I found myself wanting a little more from Together. The added Tim back-story spooks feel out of place, the ongoing mystery of what happened to a previous backpacking couple is over represented, and the theme is so obvious at every turn that the metaphor is in danger of being stripped bare. Its concept is undeniable, and the body horror imagery can be aces, but the development and execution could have been a little more, well, together.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A funny thing happens once you conclude a Final Destination movie. You start to see the world differently. After I finished watching Bloodlines, the first new film in the franchise since 2011, I found myself elevated by creative paranoia. I was holding onto an empty aluminum can and thought, “What if placing this on the counter will create a chain of events that leads to disaster?” Then I was washing our kitchen sink and looking at how close other electrical devices were to the faucet spray. Then I began thinking of all the dog toys that could position themselves underfoot and cause me to hit my head against our tile, perhaps then having that aluminum can fall on my head as a finishing move. If you’ve ever seen one of these movies, they are games of misdirection and dramatic irony, anxiously anticipating that any little item will contribute to a Rube Goldberg-esque wave of death. In many ways, the franchise brings an outlandish fear home and makes you just as crazy as the doomed characters. Final Destination: Bloodlines is a return to form for a franchise that never should have been on the brink of death. As long as people can come up with clever deaths and misdirects, there should be sequels.
Having watched and enjoyed every Final Destination movie, I will readily admit that while each of the five previous entries can be gory good fun they cannot be described as great movies, and that’s okay. They are delivery systems for amusement and absurd deaths, asking the audience to try and guess the ridiculous series of events that will contribute to the demise of whomever fills the screen. It’s a reliable formula that can be replicated again and again, where death itself is the main villain, or star, and where the appeal of the franchise is the winking game the movies are knowingly playing with the viewers. We’re here for the over-the-top machinations and dark humor of trying to guess what combination will succeed. The later sequels were populated with repellent or powerfully bland characters that we happily awaited their fateful demise, but the deaths were also getting stale, becoming more mean-spirited or more flimsier in design, giving to obvious obliteration options and then cheap shock alternative as mini-twists. If you’re going to have a game, it’s better to play by your rules. That’s where things began to go sour with me, but that doesn’t mean good writers who fully understand this franchise cannot revive it. I just thought it would have taken less time considering the inherent rebooting potential at play.
This brings us to Bloodlines, by far the most ambitious of all Final Destination movies. It attempts to really explore the mythology and history of the franchise while also grounding the characters and their drama in a surprisingly emotionally resonant manner. I’m not saying anyone is going to confuse this movie with, say, Sophie’s Choice, but the filmmakers have put in the work to make us actually care about the doomed characters and their fledgling efforts for survival. Usually these movies follow a group of strangers along with a small friend group that becomes our core. This is the first movie where all of the characters in peril are family members across generations. Watching your mother or aunt or brother die horribly before your eyes and knowing that someone else in your family is next is just more impactful than if the relationships were based on high school friendships, work colleagues, or strangers. That kind of trauma just hits differently. Also, the ages of the family dynamic present a clear direction for the path that death is planning to take, going from oldest to youngest, although death seems to put this chronological pecking order on hold to wipe out a line of siblings. Excuse the math word problem setup of what will follow. Let’s say you have Oldest Child and Youngest Child and both have two kids but Oldest Child’s kids were both born after Youngest Child’s kids. Rather than killing the descendants in descending chronological order, death would wipe out Oldest Child’s offspring first even though they are younger than the children of Younger Child. As always, it appears death is a stickler with its rules.
The opening sequence is an all-timer for the franchise, and because it sets everything in motion I don’t feel like discussing it is particularly spoiler-y, but you may decide otherwise and can skip this paragraph. According to the new mythos, this is the event that sets the entire Final Destination universe into effect. It’s a spectacular disaster set in a high-rise restaurant 400 feet in the air atop one of those Sky Needle skyscrapers. The entire sequence is brilliantly executed and edited with extremely heightened periods of dread. These first ten minutes introduce us to a young romantic couple and get us invested enough to feel bad about what’s to eventually come. They also set up the stakes as well as the twisted gallows humor to follow. I loved tracing the different elements at play, from the cracking glass dance floor, to a loose chandelier shard (if one little chandelier piece could cause cracks then this must be the weakest floor in history), to a loose penny causing mayhem all because of a snotty little brat, the real villain of the franchise. The cross-cutting between the different incidents as things ratchet up is wonderful, and the clever cuts to the creme brule being broken as that glass dance floor is cracking is just superb. This is more than just a sequence in vertigo terror. There’s a gas explosion, a falling elevator, a Titanic-esque splitting of the restaurant, and the use of a grand piano as a slapstick coup de grace that left me cheering. This opener lets you know you’re in bloody good hands with Bloodlines and it also begins to emotionally ground the film too.
This is the most self-aware of the Final Destination movies but I think it works considering it’s the sixth entry, so having characters essentially be voices for the audience’s frantic clue-guessing is appropriate. One of the better sequences in the movie is when our protagonist, Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is walking through her neighborhood and trying to absently predict the everyday dangers on a garbage day. It begins as absurd and then it becomes even more absurd when everything she predicted lines up, though not as we might have expected. The whole thing plays out like a demented and extended joke setup with death as the punchline. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for the family to get on board with this crazy idea that death is after them, so the second half of the movie is more their scrambling to plot how to cheat death established by the previous movies by either dying and being brought back or by taking a life and getting that person’s remaining time. There’s a gasp-inducing joke where characters, after discussing these rules, glance at a maternity ward and consider, “Could we actually kill a baby?” before shaking away the dark idea and going back to their original plan. It’s self-aware without being overly meta, working through the rules and expectations but without an ironic detachment that can cheapen the enjoyment of the drama and thrills. That’s important because this might be the Final Destination movie with the lowest amount of deaths after the big opener. Part of that is because we’re setting the story decades after that establishing catastrophe, where death has been busy chopping away the survivors before coming back around to our core family (there’s got to be a mathematical formula here how long it took death to catch up). You’ll have to wait longer for some kills, and a few are just haphazardly thrown together, but there’s still plenty of dreadful squirm and rueful chuckles to be had.
Considering its runaway success at the box-office, out-grossing all of the previous Final Destination movies, I doubt we’ll have to wait anywhere close to another 14 years for more franchise mayhem. These movies are perfect vehicles for twisted entertainment when they have the right people calibrating them. They may not always be great but they can be consistently great fun, and under the right mindset, exactly what you need to wash away the blahs and laugh at the absurdity of death and fate. It will also make you re-examine your home decorative plan for your own pre-emptive protection. Feng shui or die, ya’ll.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Heart Eyes (2025)/ Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
Slasher movies have been a popu;ar staple of horror, enough so to go through different phases of resurgence and ironic reinterpretation. They rose to prominence in the 1980s but are still wildly popular today, perhaps proving that there’s something timeless about a masked maniac chasing after dumb teenagers with his or her weapon of choice. Mix in heavy amounts of blood and gratuitous nudity, and it’s easy to see why this cost-effective entertainment strategy continues to endure. Two new 2025 slasher movies show the highs and middling lows of this horror genre known for its graphic kills and little else.
Heart Eyes is ostensibly about a romance-hating masked killer who stalks happy couples on Valentine’s Day and gets all stabby with their insides. However, it’s really a pretty charming romantic comedy that just so happens to also have a healthy amount of gore. The clever screenplay follows many of the same tropes we come to expect from the rom-com genre but now with a twist. It’s Boy Meets Girl, as Jay (Mason Gooding) and Ally (Olivia Holt) are forced to work together to save a romantic ad campaign gone wrong. It’s Girl getting over the pain of her recent breakup with the emergence of a handsome new man in town. It’s Guy and Girl butting heads before creating sparks. And then they’re chased repeatedly by the masked killer. They yell, “We’re not even a couple,” but it makes no difference; their chemistry is just that undeniable. In that regard, this murder menace is actively driving these two would-be lovebirds together, forcing them to rely upon one another for survival, and revealing parts of themselves. If you cut out all the horror parts, it would still work as a romance, but it’s even more entertaining to watch how the two genres, both beholden to their formulas, mash so bloody well. The banter is witty, the silly are over-the-top gory, and this is a rare movie that could be loved by gorehounds and foolish romantics. It’s an elevation that is self-aware but not obnoxiously, more silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek. You can tell there is a love for both of these genres from the filmmakers. Heart Eyes is a fun and refreshing spin on the old.
The newest Fear Street movie, based on the scream teen novels by R.L.Stein, is by far the weakest in the Netflix horror anthology series. Prom Queen is a pretty straightforward rehash of your 1980s high school movie staples of horny teens, bitchy popular girls, the less popular girl striving for Prom Queen and having to reconcile the changes she’s willing to make to be a winner, and a knife-wielding killer. Ah, the nostalgia. The issue is that there’s nothing separating this movie from, say, Prom Night, either the 1980 original or the PG-13 remake in 2008. The most thought put into this movie is the gruesome kills with some decent gore, but the whole movie doesn’t even play like a cartoon. It plays like a TV special you’ve watched before, something not just outdated but that’s been iterated upon iterations, a bland copy of a copy of a copy. The mystery of who might be the killer has some slight fun but the culprit should be easy enough to suss out when you take into account what actors have names that you remember. There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the more gruesome exploitation elements of the genre, but the kills aren’t that memorable or clever, nor are the characters that interesting even as generic stock roles. I found myself confusing many of the multiple Prom Queen candidates (why are there so many pale brunettes?). The previous Fear Street movies released in 2022 had an interesting gimmick connecting them with the history of the town going back centuries to explain its crushed nature. Prom Queen just exists in this space without doing anything to connect to the larger Shadyside mythos and cross-generational storytelling. It feels so dreary and perfunctory and rather boring, shuffling along like a zombie wearing the husk of Fear Street. It’s just not fun. It’s not outlandish enough to be silly and too dumb to be self-aware. It’s mostly unimaginative cliches warmed over and unrelated to a far more stylish and ambitious horror series. This is a Prom Queen that deserves a bucket of blood and social ostracism instead of any accolades.
Nate’s Grades:
Heart Eyes: B+
Fear Street: Prom Queen: C-
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The Monkey (2025)
It was only minutes when I thought to myself, “I think I love this movie.” To be fair, this movie might only jibe for a very select few with a penchant for gory, outlandish horror and a demented sense of humor, but it just so happens that specific population includes yours truly. The Monkey is a dark comedy about the cruel indifference of fate disguised as a supernatural thriller adaptation of a Stephen King short story. It’s about two twin brothers (both played by Theo James as an adult) coming to terms with a family curse, a toy monkey that, when wound up, will beat its drum until the final blow correlates with the sudden, often shocking death of a random person. It’s essentially a death device and the brothers are haunted by it since losing both of their parents to it as teenagers, both grasping for meaning from their tragedy. One of them blames himself and the other blames his brother, and this has warped them into adulthood and how they view themselves, their responsibility as a parent, and their hostility to one another. The movie becomes a cagey reunion between the two brothers while also vying for power over a dangerous totem that loves elaborate Final Destination-style calamities. These deaths are over-the-top, often with bodies exploding in bloody heaps, and I found myself cackling along in response to the ridiculous violence. This is quite a change of pace for writer/director Osgood Perkins who just last year helmed the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs. Whereas that movie was a bit too lost in its slow-build atmosphere and a jumbled story burdened with underdeveloped plot elements, The Monkey is refreshingly straightforward and always entertaining in its contained madness. There are some bold and dark choices made and I appreciated every one of them. This is really a movie about trying to make sense of death and grief but it’s through the visage of spilled viscera and gallows humor. I didn’t think I’d walk away saying this, but I can’t wait to show my wife the movie about the killer windup monkey.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Smile 2 (2024)
In 2022, thanks to genius viral marketing and the acknowledgement how deeply unnerving happy people can be, Smile was a surprise horror smash hit. Writer/director Parker Finn expanded on a previous short film and made serious money, which meant a sequel was a given. Finn returns to lead Smile 2 to even creepier genre pastures, this time following the mental demise of a pop star, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) trying to make sense of this malignant curse. As much as I enjoyed the first Smile for its careful development and visceral intensity, I think Smile 2 might be even better.
From the opening sequence, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a filmmaker that knows exactly what they’re doing. This is not merely another paycheck for Finn. He’s thought about how a sequel can build from its predecessor, stand on its own, incrementally build out the mythology, but mostly how to be an expertly made horror thriller designed to get under your skin. There were multiple sequences where I kept muttering variations of , “No,” or, “I don’t like that at all,” enough so that my wife in the other room would inquire what was directing these responses. Finn is tremendous at setting up the particulars of a scare sequence and allowing the audience to simmer in that anxious period of dread as we wait for something sinister to happen. He reminds me of James Wan and his ability to set up a nasty little scenario and then traps you inside awaiting the worst. There are sequences that compelled me to look away, not simply because they were overpowering, though the gore and makeup effects can best be described as impressively gross, but because the movie was finding different ways to make me uncomfortable, but in that good horror movie way. Finn’s camera makes what we should fear very clear, and his editing is precise. This is a movie that wants you to see the darkness and persistently worry about what’s coming just out of the frame.
One of my minor complaints with the first Smile was that there wasn’t much below its grinning surface. Sure, the entire premise of a curse that spreads through witnessing horrific acts of self-harm lends itself toward the discussion of how trauma begets trauma, but beyond that the first film was more reliant upon supreme craft and well-engineered scares. There’s nothing wrong with a movie that exists primarily as a thrill ride as long as those thrills deliver upon their promise. However, with Smile 2, Finn uses the character of Skye Riley as a beginning point to discuss the toxic relationships that come with fandom. It should be very obvious for every viewer that Skye is going through some serious issues. She’s overcoming addiction, physically rehabilitating her body as well as socially rehabilitating her image, and trying to learn all her new choreography for an intense world tour. This is a woman who could use a significant break. And yet, as the movie progresses, you start to sense that there is this large machinery around her that needs her to perform because that is how she makes them all money. Even her own mother-as-manager (Rosemarie DeWitt) can seem questionable as far as her motivations; is she pushing her child because she knows it’s what best for her to focus on for recovery, or is she pushing her because the tour pays for her lifestyle? As the movie progresses, the characters fret that Skye’s increasingly bizarre behavior is going to ruin the tour first and foremost, and concern for her actual well-being is secondary at best. All these people have their paychecks attached to this woman fulfilling her contractual obligations. You can also extrapolate the intense pressure the industry places on people with mental illness and self-destructive personalities to conform to standards that are unfair and often un-meetable. You might question why more pop stars don’t have head-shaving outbursts.
Because we know that the evil entity has the power to alter our sense of sight and sound, it means the viewer must be actively skeptical about what is happening. Is this really happening? Is this sort of happening but elements are different? Or is this completely a hallucination? It makes the plot the equivalent of shifting sand, never allowing us to be comfortable or complacent. This can lead to positive and negative feelings. It keeps things lively but it can feel like the plot never really moves forward, at least in a cause-effect accumulation. It can often feel like the movie is moving in starts and stops, and if you’re not onboard for the craft, the acting, and the scares, then the results can likely feel frustrating, especially when large swaths of time are canceled out. For me, I enjoyed the extra sensory game of keeping me alert because it led to a barrage of surprises and rug pulls, some of them admittedly annoying, especially losing what amounts to maybe an entire act of the movie, but also they were a definite way to keep upending the narrative certainty. This sneaky approach also very viscerally places us in the paranoid mindset of our protagonist, as we too are unable to trust our senses and tense up with certain unsettling auditory cues. Mainly, I was having too much fun with the devious twists and turns, and some wickedly disturbing imagery from the director, that I felt like it was an ongoing thrill ride through a funhouse of insanity that kept me guessing.
In a just world, Scott (Aladdin, Charlie’s Angels) would be at the front of the pack in the discussion for the Best Actress Oscar. This woman is put through the proverbial wringer and she showcases every frayed nerve, every degenerating thought with such verve and command. It’s essentially a performance of a woman completely breaking down mentally, but Scott doesn’t just go for broke, putting every ounce of effort into inhabiting the breakdown, she creates a character that reveals herself through the breakdown. It’s not just screaming hysterics and histrionics; there are different levels to her dismantling psyche, and Scott portrays them beautifully. I felt such great levels of dread for her because of how successfully Scott was able to anchor my emotional investment. She’s also portraying different versions of Skye, and some key flashbacks reveal just how toxic her former addict self was that she’s trying to put to rest. It’s a performance about metaphorical demons and literal demons haunting a woman, as well as guilt that is eating her alive. Scott allows us the pleasure of watching a first-class performance through her shattering.
There’s a curious motif to the movie that many will probably ignore but my wife and I fixated on, and so I feel the need to briefly discuss this so that, you too dear reader, can have this fixation as well. There are at least four scenes where Skye drinks a large bottle of water in a manner that can be best described as monstrously destructive. She drinks that bottle like a lost man in the desert finding his first drink of water. She attacks it. My best analysis is that this is a character detail about Skye’s addictive personality and sense of dependency, projecting the same all-consuming need onto water that she had previously for narcotics. One of the best laughs is when a doctor takes stock of Skye and says how dehydrated she is. Regardless, take in how desperately Skye Riley drinks and think about perhaps applying that technique next time you need a refreshing drink.
By its nightmarish conclusion, Smile 2 finds a fitting and satisfying end stop that promises a possible even bigger and more disturbing escalation for a Smile 3. Finn has established himself with two movies as a major horror filmmaker who can work within the mid-major studio system and still keep a perspective and integrity. I’m pleased that Smile 2 isn’t just more of the same old Smile, and in fact very few instances involve strangers with that signature facial expression. By the time you’re seeing the smile, it’s usually too late. I enjoyed the choice to find menace and darkness in a world of pop music brightness (the fake pop songs actually sound indistinguishable from what currently airs on the radio, bravo). I enjoyed the continuing tradition of casting famous Hollywood scions, like Jack Nicholson’s son playing Skye’s dead boyfriend (that family grin is uncanny, also bravo). What I really enjoyed was Scott’s uncompromising performance. Smile 2 has convinced me that Finn is the real deal, Scott might be one of our best modern scream queens and young actors, and to confirm introverted habits to avoid anyone who looks directly at me and smiles.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Substance (2024)
In 2017, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat released her debut movie, Revenge, her daring spin on the rape-revenge thriller. It was an immediate notice that this filmmaker could take any genre and spin it on its head, providing feminist influences on some of the most grisly and male-dominated exploitation cinema. Even more so, she makes whatever genre her own and on her own terms. The same can be said for The Substance, a movie that utilizes sensationalism to sensational effect. It’s a movie that is far more than the sum of its Frankenstein-esque body horror parts.
Elisabeth (Demi Moore) is a television fitness instructor who has been massively popular for decades. Upon her 50th birthday, she’s promptly dismissed from her job by her studio, concerned over her diminished appeal as a sex symbol. She gets word of a mysterious elixir that can help her reverse the ravages of aging. It arrives via a clandestine P.O. box in a container with syringes and very specific instructions. She needs to spend seven days as her younger self, and seven days as her present self. She needs to “feed” her non-primary self. She also needs to understand that she is still the same person and not to get confused. Elisabeth injects herself with the serum and, through great physical duress, “Sue” emerges from her back like a butterfly sprouting from a fleshy cocoon. As Sue (Margaret Qualley), she’s now able to bask in the fame and attention that had been drifting away. Sue becomes the next hot fitness instructor and everything the studio wants. Except she’s enjoying being Sue so much that going back to her Elisabeth self feels like a punishment. Sue/Elisabeth starts to cheat the very specific rules of substance-dom, and some very horrifying results will transpire as she becomes increasingly desperate to hold onto what she has gained.
Let me start off this review looking at the substance of The Substance, particularly the criticism that there is little below its surface-level charms. First off, let me defend surface-level charms when it comes to movies. It’s a visual medium, and sometimes the surface can be plenty when we’re dealing with artists at the top of their game. Being transported and entertained can be enough from a movie. Not every film needs to force you to re-evaluate the human condition. It’s perfectly acceptable for films to just be diversionary appeals to the senses. With that being said, the simplicity of the movie’s story and themes works to its benefit. The plotting is very clear, setting aside the rules, and then we watch the spiraling consequences when Elisabeth, and then Sue, decide to go against the rules and pay dearly. The ease of the storytelling is so precise with its cause-effect escalation, so that even when things are getting crazy, we know why. The commentary on aging in Hollywood isn’t new or subtle; yes, the industry treats young women like products to be exploited for mass consumption until they get older and are seen as less desirable. Yes, the pressure to fight the irreversible pull of aging can lead to increasingly desperate actions. Yes, being forced to cede the spotlight to someone you feel inferior can be humiliating. It’s nothing new, but it presents an effective foundation for what becomes a highly engaging, garishly repellent, and jubilantly visceral body horror deconstruction into madness. Rarely do we get an opportunity to say a movie must be seen to be believed, and The Substance is that latest must-see spectacle.
I found the exploration of identity between Sue and Elisabeth to be really interesting, as we’re told repeatedly in the instructions that the two are the same person, and yet the two versions view the other with increasing resentment and hostility. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same woman trying on different outfits of herself, but that doesn’t stop the dissociation. In short order, the two versions view one another as rivals fighting over a shared resource/home. Sue becomes the preferred version and thus the “good times” where she can feel at her best. The older Elisabeth persona then becomes the unwanted half, and the weeks spent outside the coveted persona are akin to a depression. She keeps to herself, gorges on junk food, and anxiously counts the prolonged hours until she can finally transform into Sue. Again, this is the same character, but when she’s wearing the younger woman’s body, it can’t help but trick her into feeling like a different person. This division builds a fascinating antagonism ultimately against herself. She’s literally fighting with herself over her own body, and that sounds like pertinent social commentary to me.
While The Substance might not have much to say about aging and Hollywood that hasn’t been said before, where the movie separates itself from the pack is through the power of its voice. This is a movie that announces itself at every turn; it is a loud, emphatic personality that can take your breath away one moment and leave you riotously laughing the next. The vision and filmmaking voice of this movie is unmistakable, and while we’re covering familiar thematic ground on its many subjects, the director is assuring us, “Yes, but you haven’t seen my version,” and after a few minutes, I wanted to see wherever Fargeat wanted to take me. I loved the very opening sequence that catalogues our star’s career through a time lapse shot of her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. We see the public unveiling, arguably the height of her stardom, and then progress further, from tourists taking their picture with the star, to people ignoring it, a passing dog peeing over it, and a homeless shopping cart wheeling over it. In one shot, Fargeat has already efficiently told our character’s rise and fall through imaginative and accessible visuals. There are other elements like this throughout that kept me glued to the screen, eager to see the director’s take on the material.
This is a first-rate body horror parable with wonderfully surreal touches throughout. The creation of Sue, being born from ripping from Elisabeth’s back, is an evocative and shocking image, as is the garish stapling of Elisabeth’s back/entry wound (why it makes for the poster’s key image). It’s reminiscent of a snake slithering out of its old skin, but to also have to take care of that old skin, knowing you have to metaphorically slide it back on, is another matter entirely. The literal dead weight is a reminder of the toll of this process but it’s also like they’ve been given a dependant. The spinal fluid injections are another squirm factor. I loved the way the Kubrickian production design heightens the unreality of the world. I won’t spoil where exactly the movie goes, but know that very bad things will happen beyond your wildest predictions. The finale is a tremendously bonkers climax that fulfills the gonzo, blood-soaked madness of the movie. If you’re a fan of inspired and disturbing body horror, The Substance cannot be missed.
Demi Moore is a fascinating selection for our lead. While it might have been inspired to have Qualley (Maid, Kinds of Kindness) play the younger version of her mother, Andie McDowell (Groundhog Day), it’s meaningful to have Moore as our aging figure of beauty standards. Here is an actress who has often been defined by her body, from the record payday she got for agreeing to bare it all in 1996’s Striptease, to the iconic Vanity Fair magazine cover of her nude and pregnant, to the roles where men are fighting over her body (Indecent Proposal), she’s using her body to tempt (Disclosure), or she’s using her body to push boundaries (G.I. Jane). It’s also meaningful that Moore has been out of the limelight for some time, mimicking the predicament for Elisabeth. Because of her personal history, the character has more meaning projected onto her, and Moore’s performance is that much richer. It reminded me of Nicolas Cage’s performance in Pig, a statement about an artist’s career that has much more resonance because of the years they can parlay into the lived-in role. Moore is fantastic here as our human face to the pressures and psychological torment of aging. She has less and less to hold onto, and in the later stretches of the movie, while Moore is buried under mountains of mutation makeup, she still manages to show the scared person underneath.
Qualley has more screen time in the second half of the movie and has the challenge of playing a very specific kind of character. Sue is the idealized form for Elisabeth which makes her character even more exaggerated and surreal. She’s a figure of pure id, strutting her stuff because she can, luxuriating in the sense of power she has because of the desire that she produces. Qualley goes full hyper-sexualized cartoon for the beginning part of the role, where she’s the coveted version riding high. It’s the second half, where things begin to slip away, that Qualley shines the most as the cracks begin to take hold in this carefully arranged persona of confidence.
Much needs to be said about the hyperbolic sexualization of its characters, particularly Sue as the new young fitness star. Obviously our director is intending to satirize the default male gaze of the industry, as her camera lingers over tawny body parts and close-ups of curves, crevices, and crotches. However, the sexual satire is so ridiculously exploitative that it passes over from being too much and back to the sheer overkill being the point. This is not a movie of subtlety and instead one of intensity to the point that most would turn back and say, “That’s enough now.” For a movie about the perils and pleasures of the flesh, it makes sense for the photography to be as amplified in its rampant sensuality. There are segments where every camera angle feels like a thirsty glamour shot to arouse or arrest, but again this is done for a reason, to showcase Elisabeth/Sue as the world values them. The over-the-top male gaze the movie applies can be overpowering and exhausting, but I think that’s exactly Fargeat’s point: it’s reductive, insulting, and just exhausting to exclusively view women on these narrow terms. This isn’t quite our world, as the number one show on TV is an aerobics instructor, but it’s still close enough. I can understand the tone being too much for many viewers, but if you can push through, you might see things the way Fargeat does, and every lingering and exaggerated beauty shot might make you chuckle. It’s body horror on all fronts, showing the grotesquery not just in how bodies degrade but how we degrade others’ bodies.
On a personal note, while I’ll be back-dating this review, I wrote portions of it while sitting at my father’s bedside during his last days of life. He’s the person that instilled in me the love of movies, and I learned from him the shared language of cinematic storytelling, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t go see more movies with my father while we could. I really wish he could have seen The Substance because he was always hungry for new experiences, to be wowed by something he felt like he hadn’t quite seen before, to be transported to another world. He was also a fan of dark humor, ridiculous plot twists, and over-the-top violence, and I can hear his guffawing in my head now, thinking about him watching The Substance in sustained rapturous entertainment. It’s a movie that evokes strong feelings, chief among them a compulsive need to continue watching. It’s more than a body horror movie but it’s also an excellent body horror movie. Fargeat has established herself, in two movies, as an exciting filmmaker choosing to work within genre storytelling, reusing the tools of others to claim as her own with a proto-feminist spin and an absurdist grin. The Substance is the kind of filmgoing experience so many of us crave: vivid and unforgettable. And, for my money, the grossest image in the whole movie is Dennis Quaid slurping down shrimp.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Gladiator II (2024)
It’s been twenty-four years since Russel Crowe, in his Oscar-winning role, bellowed, “Are you not entertained?” We were, we really were, and Gladiator was a huge hit in 2000 but has also held up as a twenty-first century classic that revived the sword-and-sandals epic. The late sequel hews quite closely to the path of the original Gladiator, a rare example of a movie that was quite literally writing the script as they went and succeeded wildly. The second go-round has a strong same-y feel, which is natural with sequels, but it also has trouble simply standing in the shadow of its superior predecessor.
This time we follow Paul Mescal (Aftersun) as a Roman expat who’s been living abroad as a simple man of the people, except when violence is called upon. His land is conquered by Rome, his beloved is killed, and he’s sold into slavery only to be selected to be trained as a gladiator and only to become a fan favorite who could possibly unseat the Emperor(s). Sounds familiar, right, plus with the revenge motivation? Mescal is playing Lucius, the adult nephew to the late emperor played by Joaquin Phoenix. He’s all grown up and with abs. This Maximum stand-in is actually the blandest character in the film, a scolding figure who says little and doesn’t want to be in any position of leadership. It makes for a lackluster hero especially compared to the presence and magnetism of Crowe in his leading man prime. Fortunately there’s entertaining side characters, notably Denzel Washington (The Equalizer) as a bisexual wheeler-dealer who manipulates his way to the top of the Roman Senate, even garnering the attention of the hedonist twin emperors. The script utilizes a lot of conveniences, from revelations of bloodlines to an adjacent crypt that just so happens to have old Maximus’ armor and sword. Washington’s schemes, more loose-goosey and the benefit of convenient luck than machiavellian plotting, provide the missing entertainment value from Mescal’s underdog-seeking-vengeance arc. Director Ridley Scott returns and stages some fun Colosseum action set pieces, including an aquatic based naval battle with literal sharks. The opening siege against a coastal city by the powerful Roman army is wonderfully visualized. I was never bored but I can’t say that the movie is operating at close to the same level. The second half kind of creaks to a close, with a final one-on-one that feels too lopsided and unfulfilling. The emotional resonance of the prior movie is sufficiently lacking. While Gladiator II can still get your blood moving, it’s also an exercise in rote blood-letting as diminished franchise returns.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Rebel Moon: Director’s Cut (2024)
What a rarity for a movie to potentially appear twice on my worst of the year list, and such is the destiny of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, originally released in 2023 and the first half of 2024, and now with added lengthier director’s cuts. So what do you get in the newest “Snyder cuts” besides fewer hours in your day? Let’s tackle the opening sequence demonstrating the power and villainy of our evil empire as they invade a crumbling city in resistance. Within short order we’ve witnessed: 1) female priestesses being forcefully disrobed and having their breasts branded, 2) an adorable little CGI pet become a literal suicide bomber, 3) a son brutally beating his father’s brains out of his skull to spare their family only for them all to be massacred anyway. Yikes. While there is a little more world-building absent from Snyder’s prior cuts, like a religious sect that turns the teeth of their conquered victims into a decorative washboard, even the extra time, and it is literally hours over the course of the two parts, feels strained and still poorly developed to better understand the world, the characters, the conflict, the history, anything that could make Snyder’s hopeful franchise its own universe. Theres now a giant metal goddess whose tears fuel space travel. All right then. One of the more interesting characters, the samurai-esque loner robot, is given more material but he’s still just as inscrutable. There’s plenty more cruelty here, slow-motion head shots painting the screen in sticky viscera. There’s also plenty more breathless and awkwardly extended sex scenes, but hey, at least those are consensual, so there’s that. I’m just stunned why Netflix would want different versions of these movies when they’re ultimately all housed under the same banner. It sure feels like the “Snyder cut” brand is now an expected marketing ploy to be exploited for added publicity. After all, why watch one long slightly bloody poorly written sci-fi space opera, when you could watch TWO versions, one of which being even bloodier and more miserable? Will there be an even Snyderier Snyder cut, adding more scenes of side characters suffering and even more festishized gore in even slower motion? Will the whole movie just be played in slow motion, now requiring nine hours? Where does it even end, Netflix?
Nate’s Grade: D
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