Blog Archives
The Worst Way (2026)
I was contacted by Melvin M. Claybrooks, the writer/director of an Ohio-made indie, The Worst Way, with a request for a professional review and constructive criticism on his debut film. I’m always happy to provide what I hope is a helpful and insightful analysis of people’s creative collaborations, as movies are so much work, and sometimes they work but, as often I’ve found in my many years sifting through Ohio-made indies, very often they might not. It’s good to analyze why. When the director told me his movie encapsulated the genre of “erotic psychological drama,” I’ll admit that part of me became a little wary. Perhaps it’s having a wife who has read plenty of books with varying levels of spice who refuses to read romance novels written by men, but I’m wary when men are the chief proponents of eroticism simply because the Male Gaze is long established to be a default setting after, oh, a century of movies. Still, I was willing to judge The Worst Way on its own artistic merits, hopeful that any initial genre misgivings might fade away. They never did.
The Worst Way is ostensibly a love triangle, so for better analysis, let’s focus on each corner of this messy relationship. First things first, our leading lady, Luna (Skyylie Jeter). Our introduction to her is with an opening party that parlays into some alcohol-fueled games of old, like Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle. It’s somewhat curious that adults would gather to play these games in their, I’m assuming, twenties and maybe thirties, but hey, maybe it’s nostalgic. At this party, she meets Orlando (Shawn Johnson), who swears they’ve met fifteen years prior as teenagers (given that timeline, I’m assuming these characters are at least pushing thirty if not in their 30s now). He went by David then, and this reunion triggers old memories likely romanticized from being so long ago in the past. This is a fine setup, a man from her past has returned and they’re feeling one another out as to who they are as adults and whether they may still have a connection. Except the next scene has Luna going home to her drug-dealing criminal boyfriend, Ryan (Timothy Hightower). Again, this is a familiar setup for relationship dramas, the unfulfilled character tempted by someone new. Our helpful narrator informs us that Ryan and Luna’s relationship seems one of convenience. He supplies the drugs, they get high, they have sex, and things are fine. We’re told by our narrator that after Luna stopped using drugs, though, that she recognized the sex was not so good and her relationship was little more than transactional. Given all this, we can understand why Luna might be looking for a different man, especially one who presents himself with a fancy apartment and multiple investment properties. Oh, did I also mention that Ryan is abusive, has pulled a gun on her, choked her, and repeatedly threatened to kill her if she were to leave? This seems pretty clear-cut as far as where she will eventually go, maybe even enlisting Orlando to kill Ryan for her, like a modern neo-noir.
Except that’s not what really happens. It’s confusing because her new option presents a multitude of reasons to leave, but she doesn’t. You could argue she’s afraid to leave, but the script is either trying to present a more nuanced portrayal of the psychology of leaving an abusive, controlling, predatory relationship, or it’s just muddled writing that loses sight of the character. Not only does Luna hem and haw over which man she should ultimately choose, she keeps giving Ryan more chances and incredulously defends him to her non-plussed friends: “He didn’t hit me, he choked me. There’s a difference.” Now, people are complicated and often don’t do what’s best for them. People often stick it out in toxic relationships, or are drawn to them, for a myriad of psychological and circumstantial reasons. Some people wrongly think they don’t deserve any better. Luna does not strike me as a person who feels her worth is less. This could be intriguing to explore, the contradictions of what we know we want versus what we know we should do. That can be the stuff of great drama and insight. I don’t think The Worst Way gets there. As presented, Luna is a bored woman with a high sex drive and a serious case of indecisiveness. You might end up screaming at the screen because this decision goes unanswered until the very end.
I’ll examine the merits, or lack thereof, of both paramours in my later paragraphs, but for now we’re focusing on Luna. Is she ultimately compelling to be our protagonist? Not really. Once Orlando appears, the story becomes a repetitive game of adult musical chairs, with her going back and forth to each man, swearing fidelity. Again, this can work in adulterous dramas, but it doesn’t feel like we’re getting to know Luna any better as a person. Maybe she enjoys the attention too much, and I think part of her enjoys the jealousies that she can instigate, which is why she refrains from making a choice. However, even as the movie escalates in its second half, Luna isn’t any more involved. Strangely, she becomes the third or maybe even fifth most prominent character in the last 40 minutes of the movie, as the story focuses its attention completely on the escalating war between Ryan and Orlando. It’s genuinely surprising how absent Luna is for much of the second half of the movie. To me, this feels like a tacit acknowledgement that there just isn’t enough going on with her character if she can be sidelined so readily. Given this, she comes across less like a fully-dimensional character and more like a plot catalyst to spur the men to fight. Thus the extensive attention paid to her pleasure feels more exploitative and effectively redundant.
Let’s next examine the bad boyfriend, Ryan. There’s not a lot to go on here. He’s a dealer with rage issues and rampant paranoia, even if he has good reason to be paranoid. He’s a stock villain, written simply to provide a negative impression so we understand why she wants to leave. Except she doesn’t. Is he improving as a character? Does he have goals? Does he show different sides? Does he have a personal secret that he even keeps from Luna? No to all of that. He’s merely the Bad Boyfriend. He’s meant to be dumped for someone better, typically a more well-adjusted, thoughtful, and secure character. Now imagine in a rom-com or Hallmark movie or whatever relationship drama you want to recall, if that bad boyfriend character established early stuck around for the whole movie and our heroine was having a really protracted and exasperated time trying to make a decision. There isn’t enough here to justify his continued involvement and competition for her heart. It’s not even like he’s providing something Orlando cannot, like if their sex life was more passionate or adventurous. I suppose Ryan’s run-ins with law enforcement might provide a lift of danger and excitement for her, but that seems contrived. It’s no shock then when the violent man with jealousy and anger issues plots violent and angry retribution. The fact that he’s an ongoing competitor in this love triangle is baffling and really a further indictment on Luna as a character.
That leaves us with Orlando, who has a personal history tracing back to Luna’s teenage years. It seems he was her first everything, so she says. First love, first boyfriend, and the implication is also that she lost her virginity to him. It’s one of the movie’s better jokes that she can’t recognize him because he “looks so different” from the flashbacks because he was played by a different actor. Now a grown man, he seemingly has a cushy life-style built from a legitimate business. He’s not bad with physical intimacy either. And he doesn’t abuse her or threaten to kill her. Because this love triangle feels so unbalanced, I started wondering what sinister revelations could come from Orlando to make him less enviable. I started wondering if this swanky apartment he takes Luna to was actually his because he still works as a barber. No shame to barbers, but I doubt many people could afford that kind of place, and he tells Luna he has multiple investment properties, so is all this phony? Is this going to be like The Great Gatsby and his appearance of riches and status are a carefully constructed fantasy to win over the girl that got away from his past, someone he no longer really knows as an adult and now symbolizes more to be possessed? Not really. I wondered if maybe he was going to be too sexually transgressive for Luna. Their first encounter has him set a bowl on the floor below her while he services her. When she asks him why he did this, he shrugs, takes the bowl, and literally waters his houseplants with her sexual fluids. That is… something.
Having three characters fight for romantic dominance when they should all go their respective ways isn’t a bad formula for a movie. However, the execution hinges on the audience finding these characters interesting, compelling, or at least there being enough surprises to keep us watching. I don’t know if The Worst Way can provide the rest in the wake of its unfulfilled lead trio. The screenplay involves too many scenes of characters talking through the circumstances, resetting the stakes and dynamics for an audience in case we might forget, the thing we complain about Netflix movies over. I would say that these are unnecessary recaps, but the editing can also be rather peculiar. There are several fake-outs, including a main character death that’s merely a dream. When you have characters repeating plot events without providing new insight, multiple characters sitting down to summarize the movie, and then you have multiple fake-out fantasies and dream sequences, then maybe this story isn’t quite as tight as it could be. The fact that you have a narrator means you should be able to skip the less important stuff, though it does raise the question how our narrator would know all these events if Luna wasn’t present for them, unless the whole thing was a fictional ruse.
Now I’ve gone this long into the review without talking about the production values because, as a low-budget indie film done primarily with local talent, there needs to be a sliding scale of expectations given the natural limitations of the production. Many of the scenes are composed exclusively as shot-reverse shot compositions with little coverage, likely for efficiency rather than as some grand visual design. The camera and lighting quality are perfectly acceptable. The sound design, also a repeated issue for many low-budget indies, is solid. I find that many shortcomings from a production standpoint can be forgiven if I’m simply hooked on the creative ingenuity, storytelling, or acting. Not every movie needs to look like a sleek David Fincher thriller. Some of the sets are quite good, like that swanky apartment with large windows of a city-wide vista (come to scenic Toledo!). I really liked the cutting back and forth from Orlando and Luna as adults to them as teenagers lying on the grass, faces illuminated by fireworks. That’s cinematic stuff, and I wish the film had played around more visually with its sense of memory. The main acting runs the gamut from stiff and limited to competent to promising. I found the best actor to be Hightower as our villain. He offers more degrees of pomposity meant to be lampooned that make his performance more entertaining. I actually think the movie’s last 40 minutes, where it abandons Luna’s perspective, is the most entertaining and successful part of the movie. While Ryan and Orlando are still characters with limits, their war of machismo has a tit-for-tat that feels like actual story progression. It’s also where the movie opens up several of Ryan’s friends as supporting characters, and I enjoyed them. I like that one of these guys is preaching caution. Another guy is promising to leave for good to live overseas with his girl, just after all this. At that point, I found myself more invested in Ryan’s buddies than anyone else in the movie, so it was kind of working for me.
For me, there’s a narrow line between something being erotic and something being exploitative, but I suppose, much like sexuality, it really depends on what someone is looking for (the old adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” can also apply to eroticism). Erotic thrillers had their heyday many decades ago and feel like a dated remnant of the past, but that doesn’t mean cinema must be chaste and lack any passion or sensuality. It is, after all, a medium for the senses. From my subjective perspective, the erotic nature of the movie just felt like slightly longer sex scenes that weren’t exactly sexy (remember the well-placed bowl for the man’s plants?) but then they weren’t exactly that memorably transgressive (except the plant thing, obviously) or button-pushing either. The emphasis on physical connection could have opened up these characters in meaningful ways, from what desire denied and desire fulfilled are doing to each of them. It’s just that when you place so much narrative emphasis on your main three characters in a romantic triangle, you’re making a bet that the audience is going to find these people interesting or at least the dilemma compelling. The Worst Way is far from the worst, and eager fans for something more daring or adult could potentially find some purchase here, but it was a drama that felt a little too underdeveloped with characters unworthy of your investment. Because of the limitations of the three main characters, as well as the lack of psychological analysis, I found them mostly just bodies on a screen, occasionally bumping into one another for violence or pleasure, but rarely ever compelling.
Nate’s Grade: C-
Share this:
Citizen Vigilante (2026)
In 2016, notorious film director Uwe Boll announced his retirement from the movies, and for a while it seemed like it would stick. He settled into being a surprisingly successful restaurant owner and seemed comfortable with leaving directing behind. Still, as someone who had watched and reviewed 27 Boll movies and written over 48,000 words on the man’s oeuvre, I had my doubts. I even said in my review for the 2019 documentary about his career, “I also don’t think Boll will stick with his retirement. Much like Kevin Smith and Steven Soderbergh, other filmmakers who swore retirement, I think this period will be but a breath, a pause until Boll finds something that inspires him.” Well, it looks like what inspired him was making his own even-more-racist version of Death Wish. Originally titled The Dark Knight, until the lawyers got involved, Citizen Vigilante is Boll’s most prominent movie in nearly two decades. He’s actually injected himself into the culture wars and gained a whiff of relevancy that’s long eluded him. Citizen Vigilante is being hailed by rightwing audiences and pundits as “the movie woke Hollywood would never make.” Elon Musk posted the entire movie on Twitter, which is technically piracy. It became the number-one movie for digital platforms like Apple and Amazon. I’ve watched Citizen Vigilante and I can say with full confidence…welcome back to the Worst of the Year film lists, Uwe Boll. We’ve been saving a spot for you in your absence.
Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer) is an ex-Army officer living in “Europe.” Where in “Europe” you might ask? Unclear, though probably Germany. I raise this because the movie literally opens with a title card that just tells us we are in “Europe,” not a country or a city but the continent. In the opening minutes, we also see an immigrant stab a nice lady in the neck for no reason. The news informs us that immigrants and migrants have been coming to “Europe” and wreaking havoc, terrorizing God-fearing, tax-paying citizens with their foreign cultures, foreign languages, and depraved sensibilities. It’s in this setting that the people need a hero. It just so happens Michael stalks the streets of “Europe” as the Vigilante Citizen, finding those who have exploited the “European” systems of justice.
Let’s take three scenes that I think are emblematic of the thinking behind this whole endeavor as well as the impression of our problematic protagonist The first follows Michael as he heads to the hospital to talk with a survivor of rape and assault. However, on the way there, a trio of teenage hooligans board his bus and refuse to pay the fare, to the consternation of the beleaguered bus driver. Michael agrees to pay their fares and sits down beside them. He then lectures the trio of teens on macro-economics, explaining how their breaking the law and refusing to pay bus fare eventually contributes to a larger cost the rest of society has to pay. To no one’s surprise, the teens seem unimpressed, and later in the movie will be hilariously harassing one kid just sitting at a bench. These teen hooligan characters are so devoid of believability that they exist merely as an older generational boogeyman (“You can’t go out at this hour… there’s teens! And they have… attitude!”). Anyway, he ventures into the hospital and talks with the poor woman who was gang-raped and beaten. He asks her a series of questions about her attackers and says he’s there to seek justice. However, he purposely manipulates her by indicating the judicial process is slow and will require her to relive all of her trauma, and she doesn’t really want that, does she? Instead, he argues, he could provide his own justice on her behalf. To no surprise, she chooses the latter. Way to prey on this woman’s fears to be given permission to do what you really want to do, hurt bad people. Do you think he would have actually respected her choice if she chose to side with the court system? I doubt it. He might pretend to be serving unmet justice, but he’s looking for access to his blood-lust by any means. Another bewildering example of this is when he’s kidnapped a judge to lecture and execute, and to prove some point about the docility of innocents, he literally drives into oncoming traffic, forces a car to crash and roll over, and presumably kills an innocent motorist. What was that guy’s sin, huh?
Another telling moment is when he’s walking the halls of a brothel, which literally looks like a general office hallway. Granted, since we’re in “Europe,” who’s to say that there couldn’t be an entrepreneur making unorthodox use of their building space? Regardless, he propositions one woman ($15 for sex and $30 for more than one position). They go into her office/bedroom and have at it. Now, I thought Michael was patrolling this location because the women were victims of sex trafficking and he was going to free them from their terror. I wasn’t expecting him to merely partake, and partake he does, though at no point does Michael ask her to role play cannibalism. However, during sex, he is distracted because he sees mold spots on the ceiling. He explains to her that this is a hazard from too much moisture, as if she’s the one in charge of the upkeep of the dwellings. He then reveals he’s actually the landlord of the building and he came for a “surprise inspection.” He then tells her that he will, indeed, pay her the thirty-dollars and flips her over for some more sex (you better believe this guy is into choking). What a modern gentleman. Despite his “generosity,” Michael is more concerned about the building upkeep than these women, again, who could be suffering from trafficking and lacking agency or the choice to leave. I guess since it might not be some immigrant responsible for their torment he’s decided to overlook this possible oppression.
The last telling moment is when the police storm his apartment. Through a series of security cameras, he anticipates their imminent arrival and hides behind a metal shield with thin openings for two automatic rifles to stick their barrels out. He warns the armed officers that he understands they’re doing their duty but advises them to leave. They obviously do not. He then massacres them all from behind his shield wall, awkwardly handling each rifle with one arm, magically shooting every one of these officers. Then again these guys all stand in the open and do not move for cover, so maybe they weren’t the top of their class. They then send in more guys who also get massacred. Firstly, did these new guys not learn anything from the last batch of sacrificial offerings? Does nobody maybe just plan for a long-term siege and wait him out considering they know he’s stuck behind his little wall? The other telling aspect is that Michael shows no compulsion in killing these officers. He would say he warned them, but he also acknowledged they were doing their jobs, and for that he has declared they must die. So Mr. Law and Order doesn’t care so much about said law and order if it impedes his vigilante hobby. I would argue this fact should make the character less appealing to certain conservative audiences but after January 6th, perhaps taking their violent fantasies out on law enforcement when it stops them from doing whatever they want to do is their new definition of “backing the blue.”
As a whole, I think all of these scenes really paint a picture as to the character of Michael, the self-styled Vigilante Citizen, who says he’’s the protector of the people, but I think he’s really more just a guy who likes violence and finds flimsy moral justifications to enact it. Still, that could have been somewhat interesting to explore as a character study, but that’s not what Boll is interested in. This movie transforms completely in its final twenty minutes into a dehumanizing and racist diatribe (spoilers to follow). He tracks one of the rapists down and it happens to be a teenager from the Middle East. So Michael decides to hold the entire family hostage and blames them all. What did this kid’s teen sister have to do with this? Or his mom and dad? Mom says her culture has conditioned her to blame these scantily-dressed European women for any sex crimes brought against them, but then is she not also a victim of bad thinking? Is she so irredeemable in her perspective that she could not change her mind over time? Should she be sentenced to death for having bad thoughts? If you open that up, where do you even stop? Michael coaxes the kid to call his friends and tell them to come over so they can be executed one-by-one, but what verification is there in Michael’s alleged hunt for justice? He’s shooting people as they arrive, some of whom he never even sees their faces, so how can he verify these are the culprits? What if some guy just walked in? What if one of these guilty teens brought along an innocent friend? Who’s to say that the Middle Eastern kid even sent the message to the correct people. Ladies and gentlemen, this ugly incident of mass execution by way of racism is the movie’s climax. It made me feel not just bad but scathingly unclean, especially knowing some will pump their fists in celebration, point to the screen, and holler, “Damn right my dude!”
This is only the second movie for Hammer since 2022’s Death on the Nile, the last time he graced a Hollywood studio production. Boll is known for welcoming actors on the fringes and people Hollywood has turned a cold shoulder to, so it makes sense for him to swoop up Hammer. And you know what? He’s as convincing as this sort of character was ever going to be. Hammer still has screen presence, and even though this is schlocky genre nonsense, the man still brings something to the role. I want to respect that but I also find it hard to respect a role that is so blatantly xenophobic wish-fulfillment propaganda.
Considering the vile politics of Citizen Vigilante, and considering it literally ends with a dedication to the “thousands of murder and rape victims from immigrants,” it’s worth bringing up the question whether or not Boll believes any of the messages of his movie or if he’s merely pandering to people that do. Other critics have commented that Boll has had conservative leanings given some of his earlier films like Postal, and I must say, as the world’s leading expert on the cinematic offerings of one Dr. Boll, I disagree. Now, obviously I can’t look into the man’s heart and know what he truly feels about this subject, but now after watching 28 of the man’s movies, I feel like he’s at least a quirky neighbor that I’ve gotten to better know. This is the same man who made a movie about the genocide in Sudan (Attack on Darfur), the same man who lambasted the prison system for its abuses (Stoic), the same man who denounced the greedy fat cats of Wall Street (Assault on Wall Street), the same man who early in his career made a movie denouncing gun violence in schools (Heart of America), and the same man who crafted a nihilistic Vietnam War movie that condemned the very idea of war (Tunnel Rats), which still happens to be his best movie. Despite his recent output’s fascination with self-righteous spree killers (Rampage 1-3), I don’t think Boll really leans rightward. That brings up the alternative: this is a calculated grift aimed directly at racists. This I can believe, as Boll will chase after any audience that might provide him enough funding to move onto the next project and the next. Does that make the movie worse or does that make the movie a secret screed against this diseased way of thought? After all, the main character is a U.S. citizen living in “Europe,” making him… a violent and dangerous immigrant. I’m putting too much of my own thought into what is ultimately a thoughtlessly grimy vigilante thriller, but after 28 Uwe Boll movies, it’s hard not to pontificate. Unless you’ve been dying to see a certain selection of people die onscreen, steer clear of Citizen Vigilante at all costs.
Nate’s Grade: D-
Share this:
Backrooms (2026)
I’ve been a fan of horror movies since my high school days. I’ve literally watched hundreds of them over the decades and find myself more drawn to them of late, perhaps a reflection of the horrors we seem to be processing in our daily lives from the deluge of current events, scandals, and moral failures. I will often feel discomfort, dread, and tension from horror and suspense movies, but it’s rare for me to feel genuine terror, to be afraid to the point where I could be haunted afterwards with the threat of nightmares. It takes a lot to get to me. It’s been maybe ten years since a horror movie really unnerved me and got under my skin. Backrooms is that movie. I was deeply affected and jarred from this little liminal horror movie. That’s the highest praise I can offer, and the fact that a 20-year-old director is responsible for that is amazing. Even if you have no knowledge of the popular YouTube series, dive into Backrooms.
Based on the creepy pasta Web series, Backrooms is set in 1990 and primarily follows two characters. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner of a failing furniture store with plenty of personal baggage over his failed marriage and unrealized career as an architect. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), has her own parental trauma she’s trying to work through. One day Clark discovers a strange doorway to another dimension in the basement of his furniture store. It’s a seemingly endless hallway reminiscent of an open-spaced office building, and Clark decides he needs to explore this strange new space, but can he make it back, will he hold onto his sanity, and are there malevolent forces inside this space to avoid?
The strength of Backrooms, as a concept as well as a feature film, is how it taps directly into your limbic system to communicate that everything is just inescapably wrong. Everything looks wrong, everything sounds wrong, you worry that another turn of another hallway is only going to bring about further ruin, and so every additional second in this inter-dimensional space makes you want to retreat. It has the living contours of a nightmare world where there is a lack of concrete details, where things are approximating real-life but just a means off, little uncanny differences or limitations that alert your brain that things are not as they should be. There are small examples, like a chair with five legs instead of four or a stop sign with its writing backwards, and then there are more arresting imagery, like chairs sinking into the floor like sand, or a series of telephone poles increasingly bending forward like a splayed rib cage. Exploring a world of these distortions leads to deeply fascinating and also unsettling imagery that can lead to a suffocating atmosphere of unease. It makes for a rather entrancing experience of analogue, dead mall aesthetics that have a subliminal pull that draws you innately while making you feel off-balance. Like the definition of the uncanny, it takes the familiar and mundane and distorts it into something truly eerie.
But this is more than just a 100-minute extension of the short-form YouTube videos. Director Kane Parsons has certainly leveled up his craft in his film debut. This is a weird world he’s intimately familiar with, but the big-screen jaunt is carefully made to be inclusive and adapted like an actual movie. There’s work here on characters using the Backrooms as an exploration of their unresolved personal traumas, for Clark his rage against a world and the people he felt have failed him, for Dr. Kline her oppressive and mentally ill mother. I like that it’s never clarified whether or not Dr. Kline’s mother was just crazy or whether she too became aware of the Backrooms dimension and was trying to protect her daughter. There are hints of larger lore but the movie isn’t drowning in it, just like there’s some basic explanation given to this dimension and its rules, just enough to satisfy without going into too much explanation. This was my main issue with 2019’s Us, Jordan Peele’s creepy and thrilling nightmare about dopplegangers revolting, and also a movie that shattered its own credulity once it attempted to provide a logical explanation. Not everything that’s strange in a movie needs a thorough explanation. We can readily accept the unbelievable on its own terms. There are more traditional horror movie elements, like jump scares, frantic chases, and the Big Scary Something Coming to Get You, but Parsons makes them all work. There’s a jump scare in this movie that didn’t just make me jump but made me gurgle something unintelligibly in response. There are several agonizing setups of characters contemplating journeying through tight or slanted or altogether ominous spaces and I was shrinking in my theater chair, dissolving in the simmering anxiety, and repeating “no” a lot. The use of found footage is perhaps the best in any movie in a decade. Even at the young age of twenty, Parsons shows not just a knack for creepy imagery but on how to craft and escalate suspense set pieces, how to build and punctuate a suffocating atmosphere, while also balancing characters, story arcs (learning acceptance and accountability!), and metaphors (a concrete hand print she carries with her from childhood!) and themes without losing sight of the core scares and their appeal. Parsons has already proven that he’s the real deal and he’s not even old enough to legally drink in the U.S. yet.
There’s an interesting meta commentary here about the junky iterative process of generative A.I., though this is speculation on my part, though I find it founded in logic within the movie. We’re told repeatedly that the Backrooms doesn’t create things as much as it recreates from its surroundings and the memories of its participants. There’s a reason most of what is explored is a reflection of the furniture store it’s attached to. Except it cannot get things exactly right. Clark explains it like describing a dog to an alien that’s never seen or known the reference and then having the alien create what it thinks a dog would be; the larger shape and idea might be there but the details are inexact or incorrect. For me, this corresponds with the rise of generative A.I., where it tries to replicate real-life but is often prone to strange hallucinations, like human bodies with peculiar joint hinges, extra fingers, or smoothly elastic skin. There’s also very Backrooms-esque visuals of furniture being eaten by walls and floors. Generative A.I. is limited to only replicating what it has been fed, and it often spits back something that looks alien, missing those crucial details to seem real. There’s a memorable tracking shot in the movie that descends floor after floor, and we witness the same room layout go through round after round of regeneration and distortion, getting further and further from the original source with each iteration. What begins with a recliner and windows becomes chairs sinking into the floor, the outlines of windows against solid walls, and finally nothing. Parsons doesn’t have to be explicit but the pointed commentary can be found on A.I.’s limits.
I don’t know about you but if I discovered a portal to another dimension, I don’t think I’d take it upon myself to go exploring. I understand why the movie does so because, well, we need a movie, and that discovery is where the horror lies, and it makes sense for Clark since it’s a reflection of his own memories and unfulfilled ambitions. I get it. However, if this was real-life, I would immediately retreat after confirming that, yes, this strange doorway indeed exists. Perhaps I’ve seen enough spooky movies or it’s just an overabundance of caution in my nature, but I would definitely stay home and let someone else become the latest lost entity to the siren song of human curiosity. Somebody else can be monster chow.
The origins of the Backrooms predates Parsons and his popular YouTube experimental shorts, but it was he who really popularized it and took it to another level, and now with his film debut, Parsons has done something remarkable. It’s not just the bold announcement of a new cinematic voice. It really feels like this movie could be the start of something monumental, a tide-changer along the lines of John Carpenter’s Halloween. He’s not the first filmmaker to explore liminal imagery and dream logic, as we’ve seen from Severance, to The Stanley Parable, to the entire career of David Lynch. I can already hear some Hollywood studio exec saying, “Gen-Z kids, they love them their liminal spaces,” or some kind of erroneous lesson from the runaway success of Backrooms. Get ready for a flood of imitators exploring minimalIst abandoned spaces. I was entranced and deeply disturbed by this movie to the point where I kept shuddering even after the credits rolled. It’s not because of shock value or emotional manipulation, it was because Backrooms got to me, unnerved me, and shook me up, in a way no movie has for a long time.
Nate’s Grade: A
Share this:
Slanted (2026)
It’s The Substance meets Mean Girls and it’s a frustrating execution of a provocative concept. Writer/director Amy Wang follows Chinese-American teenager Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) as she struggles to be accepted in her predominantly white, middle class, suburban school system. She sets her sights on being accepted by the popular girls, so she abandons her Chinese heritage, food, and looks to better adopt the habits of the very blonde popular clique, but bleaching her hair isn’t good enough to get what she wants. She discovers a mysterious company promising a scientific solution: they will genetically alter you to the race that you desire. What a fantastic plot device to explore racial identity, assimilation, prejudice, stereotypes, and more. It’s a crying shame then for this premise to be completely shackled to a high school cliques storyline. It’s so boring for our protagonist to be completely consumed with being prom queen when she’s just undergone an amazing and ethically questionable procedure. I kept waiting and wanting Slanted to do something more, to better explore the social commentary at stake but it’s really no different than your familiar story of non-popular girl sacrifices her personality and old friends to be popular only for them to remark, “You’ve changed!” This is such a crushing waste of such a promising premise. There’s not even memorable body horror; at one point we do get droopy face. Slanted is less a horror movie and more a middling drama too timid to better explore the rich implications of its concept. This is the kind of idea calling for surreal and excoriating satire, something along the likes of Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You). To narrowly frame this story as an outsider wanting to be popular in high school is just terribly limited and disappointing and ultimately dull.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Obsession (2026)
It seems like the world has become obsessed with the new indie horror film, Obsession. It’s the gruesome brainchild of writer/director Curry Barker, a 26-year-old debut filmmaker best known for sketch comedy on his YouTube channel, That’s a Bad Idea. With RackaRacka’s Talk to Me, Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, Mark Iplier’s Ironlung, and now Barker’s Obsession, it appears we’re heading into a renaissance of YouTube creators blossoming as indie horror mavens, and this is days away from 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ release of Backrooms, a feature based on his experimental liminal nightmare YouTube video. It’s probably inevitable for Mr. Beast to eventually make a horror movie, isn’t it? That’s scary.
Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) has been nursing a crush on his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. He’s never had the courage to just tell her how he feels.Then one night Nikki just point-blank asks him: do you have feelings for me? He stammers and says, “I think we’re good as friends.” Immediately afterwards in his humiliation, he breaks a novelty One Wish Willow stick and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.” From that moment forward, Nikki changes. She’s ferociously devoted to Bear and incredibly needy and volatile. She takes clingy to another level.
We’ve seen plenty of iterations of the “be careful what you wish for” tale of horror and irony, but Barker makes it his own with such confidence. There’s a prevailing sense of dread throughout the movie that just sits in your gut, miring every post-wish scene in discomfort. It can be greatly entertaining to anticipate just how things will go wrong with each scene. Barker demonstrates a tremendous sense of restraint and dedication, favoring to tease out the audience discomfort. I appreciate how much of the movie’s focus is on building unease over jump scares. There are moments where Barker’s camera forces you to study Nikki’s face draped in shadows as she stands upright in a corner, and it’s far more unsettling than if she had just popped around a corner to startle the audience. There’s a certain dark enjoyment to watching a character get in over their head, especially when they have robbed another character of agency, the whole reaping the consequences of their actions. Watching Bear get punished is a sort of cosmic reward as well as a test to see how far he will go to try and make this “relationship” work. Barker’s background in comedy is evident through his skill with pacing scenes and as a whole, and the film benefits from the mordant tone often dipping into cringe comedy and nervous laughter. This man clearly has an affinity for horror and the chops to make a compelling movie connect with an audience and leave a mark.
Obsession wouldn’t be nearly as worthy of obsession without the captivating and shifty lead performance of Navarette (Superman & Lois). I initially thought it was a mistake we see so little of the Before Wish Nikki, but limiting our exposure means we’re trapped in defining Nikki through Bear’s perceptions and projections, and I think that’s smart. The majority of her performance is after the wish, and Navarrette is just as terrifying as she is unexpectedly hilarious. She contorts her face into exaggerated, almost Jim Carrey-esque expressions. When she’s trying to be the blithely happy girlfriend, she scrunches her face into a pained smile that approaches a grimace, a mockery of how women might be expected to look when given the unhelpful advice to smile more. Her juvenile meltdowns and tantrums remind us that Nikki has degenerated into a sickening distortion. Navarratte’s performance has layers to it, finding little physical tricks to cue us about the Nikki imprisoned inside her own body. It’s amazing the flickers of “help me” she can manifest through her eyes alone while the rest of her face is pretending to be a different person. Some of the greatest acting performances of our modern era come from overlooked actresses in unfairly underrated horror movies. In a just universe, Florence Pugh would have been nominated for an Oscar for 2019’s Midsommar, Naomi Scott would have been nominated for 2024’s Smile 2, Sophie Thatcher would have been nominated for 2025’s Companion, and Inde Navarrette would be nominated for Obsession.
Obsession has such a great premise and direction, which is why it’s a shame that there are plot turns that feel disconnected from the rules and characterization Barker has established. Having a super obsessive significant other leads to obvious disadvantages, like being dangerously possessive, paranoid, and losing one’s sense of having an independent identity. Having Nikki make awkward scenes in public, test her partner’s love and devotion, and get easily jealous to the point of madness all makes sense as an extreme encapsulation of Bear’s wish for unparalleled love. Having Nikki stand literally in place for hours and wait for Bear to return from work, to the point that she even pees down her own legs, is quite effective at communicating just how much this woman is losing herself under this spell. Those decisions refine and perfectly demonstrate the disturbing outcomes of Bear’s wish. However, not all of her decision-making has this same identifiable logic. Early in the film, Bear’s cat dies from ingesting a bunch of his prescription drugs. How the cat got into the medicine cabinet or broke the child-proof seal without thumbs is never fully explained except for the implicit assumption that Bear had his pill bottles open and accessible (this guy really shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s care, human or animal). Afterwards, when Nikki is fully under the wish’s evil power, she does two things with this dead cat. The first might be explained as a means of memorializing the pet, but the second one is just inexplicable and feels more like a cruel prank. It’s hard for me to connect this action to the film’s extension of obsessive love. It broke me from the movie, the same as when during a party game, Nikki recites a twisted retelling of Hansel and Gretel that devolves into incestuous role play. Does she think this little performance will impress Bear? If she’s purposely trying to just be oft-putting to the others, why even indulge the game? The problem for me is that Obsession has just enough of these questionable little turns that felt outside the bounds of its rules. The impulsive self-harm as misguided devotion or flagrant emotional manipulation makes sense. Looming over Bear while he sleeps to watch can even make sense. But not every crazy action has the same logic. Now, you could just wave away every crazy act as, “Well, it’s unexplainable magic,” but I find that an unsatisfying excuse for plot developments that feel more arbitrary than organic extensions.
The other area that nagged at me was the ending and how I felt it conflicts with not just the characterization of our protagonist but also the social commentary against Bear. In order to really delve into this, I’ll have to invoke spoilers, so skip ahead TWO paragraphs dear reader if you wish to remain pure. Earlier, when Bear is on the phone with the One Wish Willow customer support, a fabulous scene by the by, we learn that the wish will remain in gruesome effect until either the recipient or the wish-maker is deceased. Barker has set up the possibility for ending this nightmare but it involves permanent death. Late in the film, the “real Nikki” manages to speak to Bear while Nikki sleeps, like a ventriloquist voice sneaking out undetected. In this fleeting moment of communication, she begs for death to end her torment. Bear is aghast at the request but he’s also offended; would a romance with Bear be so intolerable to prefer death? That’s because Bear is a bad person. He shrouds himself in the armor of being the unassuming “nice guy” and yet his ensuing behavior seems far more selfish and entitled. It’s evident to everyone who knows Nikki that, post-wish, this version of her is not the real Nikki. She’s a completely different person. They’re justifiably worried. It’s purposely incredulous for Bear to think that Nikki has just come around and her sudden and very intense fixation is her genuine choice. He’s not that stupid. However, this Nikki is a scary, crazed cartoon version, with her personality, humor, and ambition hollowed out. For all intents and purposes, it’s like Bear has lobotomized his crush. He takes his time before getting physically intimate with her despite her begging, but it still doesn’t stop him. He finally got the girl and he doesn’t want to let go of her even if it means trapping her in a unique hell.
Now, after some unfortunate and bloody consequences, Bear locks himself in his bathroom with the determination to finally take account and end his life. He thinks about putting a gun in his mouth but doesn’t have the resolve for that. Instead, he takes the same prescription drugs his cat overdosed on and swallows the bottle’s contents. From everything I’ve witnessed of this character, I do not believe he would be the kind of person who would accept accountability and sacrifice himself. He’s too selfish and cowardly. He’s also just too meek and incapable of making hard choices. I could believe him wanting to be brave and noble and make the sacrifice to save Nikki but then, after swallowing the pills, he immediately regrets this decision and throws them up. I don’t buy Bear learning from his grave error. I can believe him having to live with it and being consumed by guilt, and yet he’ll grow numb and accept his new normal eventually, with the guilt likely leveling out over time. The pointed commentary is against the toxic entitlement that men feel in possession of women, especially those denigrating being “friend-zoned” as if platonic friendship is itself a worthless compensatory prize from a woman. It’s sizing up guys like Bear who think of themselves as the guy who just wants a break from the universe who also happens to be completely ignorant to those other opportunities within reach. He’s too fixated on what he doesn’t have to the point that it’s become his identity. He wouldn’t know what to do with Nikki if he got her, which is evident by the rest of the movie. God help this guy if he actually decided to work on himself or calibrate his insecurities and projections. This guy sucks and that’s the point. Horror movies typically end with a would-be solution to the dilemma that proves false, ultimately dooming the protagonist to misery. For Obsession to revive the real Nikki through Bear’s ultimate sacrifice feels completely wrong. It’s giving this loser character a chance at unearned redemption as well as harming its critical message.
While not quite living up to its momentous hype, Obsession is still an unnerving and memorably uncomfortable film experience, from its compounding dread, to its macabre laughs, to its provocative performances, chiefly our chief victim. I have some issues with the iffy internal logic too often feeling arbitrary, and the ending feels both rushed and wrong, sabotaging the larger commentary against men like our self-pitying protagonist. Some might complain that much of the movie could have been resolved had the four main characters just had one honest conversation, but that’s what makes the movie tragic. We see the many detours that could have avoided the worst. I know the majority of my review is me assessing my gripes, but Obsession is a good and very disquieting movie. I just felt like it could have been a great film. Still, this is quite a promising debut for Barker, who has now been tapped by A24 to remake none other than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While I might not be as smitten, Obsession is a creepy and entertaining modern update on an old cautionary adage.
Nate’s Grade: B
Share this:
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)
I have been told by numerous friends and other critics that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You falls in that dreaded entertainment zone of the “difficult watch.” These are usually made up of admired movies tackling challenging subjects in unflinching ways, movies that are easier to admire than love. I was girding myself to finally watch If I Had Legs (this will be the reference for the title from here out because, frankly, I’m too lazy to type out an extra three words every reference), I found it pretty despairing, especially for women, especially for parents of young children, and especially for those suffering or who have suffered through some degree of post-partum depression. This movie is a sensory immersion into the frazzled, anxious, and punishing existence of our heroine, just trying to catch her breath or get a break in a universe that seems cruelly engineered to only provide stressors. It’s a truly phenomenal movie giving bristling life to the perspective of writer/director Mary Bronstein (Yeast), with stylistic and surreal touches that reminded me of Charlie Kaufman or even Franz Kafka. The tragi-comic absurdity, as well as the unrelenting existential anxiety, is meant to provoke a primal, wince-inducing response, eliciting sympathy for the countless mothers coasting hour-to-hour looking for a little oasis of relief. If I Had Legs is one of those rare feel-bad experiences that I not only admire but I think I actually love.
Rose Byrne plays Linda, a forty-something woman being pulled in every direction. Her young daughter is suffering from a physical malady that requires her to have a feeding tube, and she needs to gain weight in order to have the tube removed, but the child can’t gain weight because she doesn’t want to eat, and this obstacle is compounded by the hospital telling Linda if the child doesn’t meet her goal weight, then it’s a reflection of neglect, and Linda herself will have to attend parenting classes. The child is also, let’s put this nicely, very high-maintenance and attention-demanding. There’s also Linda’s husband who is away at sea and generally unhelpful and curt whenever caught on the phone. Linda also has a therapist (Conan O’Brien) who is likewise generally unhelpful and seems disdainful even talking to her. Then the roof of her apartment explodes with a torrent of water, and now Linda and her daughter have to live out of a local motel, further exacerbating all of their personal problems. It’s forty minutes in when the movie reveals Linda’s profession and I genuinely gasped: she’s a psychiatrist with her own very demanding clients to counsel. It’s not easy being Linda, but then again, there are plenty of Lindas in the world just waiting to catch a break.
This movie is a lot. It’s a lot to process, and it’s very deliberately using disorienting creative decisions to test your limits. The sound design is an especially effective dynamic that raises anxiety. Bronstein never shows you the face of Linda’s daughter, at least not until the very end of the movie, and there’s a stark reason for this. Our identity is Linda, and this voice that keeps coming in, frequently interrupting, occasionally screaming, and often compounding the stress of her mom, is designed to be viewed as a primary source of agitation. We don’t see the daughter because in this vision she doesn’t exist as a character but more as a burden. We view the child as Linda perceives her. There’s a trying sequence where Linda’s client leaves her baby behind and vanishes, forcing Linda to cart around a crying baby while frantically looking for the mother. The soundtrack of a crying baby is like a direct line to your nervous system that something is wrong and all you want is for the child to be soothed, but it keeps going for nearly five minutes straight, with that screechy wailing eating away at you one cry at a time. I can readily imagine my wife watching this movie and just turning it off after ten minutes.
The movie is packed with these creative decisions, all designed to make Linda’s perspective that much more empathetic and exhausting. For those tut-tuting Linda viewing her daughter as a burden, I’d ask for some grace, but also the movie doesn’t withhold criticism from its protagonist. She can be selfish as she’s spiraling, even seeking comfort in bad places. It would be harder to endure if the perspective was purely Job-like, wherein Linda relentlessly suffers because the universe is indifferent, or God is unhappy and spitefully targeting this poor woman. It does feel like everything is going wrong, but that’s also because we’re anchored in Linda’s perspective. Seeing things from her daughter’s perspective would make for a fairly different movie, but that’s not what this movie aspires to be. It’s not meant to be balanced, it’s meant to convey a very specific viewpoint, and that perspective feels like everything is stacked against you. In one key moment, what my pal Eric Muller dubbed Byrne’s “Oscar clip moment,” she unloads on her therapist and desperately pleads for someone to just tell her exactly what to do, to have responsibility and uncertainty stripped from her life. She wants a clear direction and the relief of knowing what to do, something that is rarely so clear in the adult world. It’s hard not to feel for Linda in the movie unless you’re actively trying to reject the vision of the director. If I Had Legs is a movie deliberately designed to be overstimulating and upsetting, so it’s going to be a select audience willing to wallow in the discomfort for the insight offered. I can see plenty saying, “Yeah, I live this, so no thanks.” I get it. After becoming a parent myself, my tolerance for emotionally-draining media certainly lowered. However, I think there’s ample artistic accomplishment to be savored with If I Had Legs that is worth treading the discomfort.
Byrne has been playing around the world of comedies since 2010’s Get Him to the Greek (a peak candidate for “most canceled cast” of the modern era, Byrne excluded) that I forgot how great she can also be in dramas. This is my favorite female performance of 2025. She is astounding. It’s smart to hire an actress of Byrne’s caliber, someone capable of finding the dark humor and exasperated guffaws of a life that feels like an assembly line of slaps to the face. The camera also rarely leaves her orbit, tacitly tying our sympathies, and it takes a lot to command the screen knowing your face is often going to be the measured focal point of every reaction to every slight and surprise and shock. She is the face of beleaguered motherhood, and it’s hard not to relate to at least a dozen moments of this nuanced and transcendent performance.
I don’t believe that If I Had Legs is unforgivably bleak; it’s certainly intense and agitating, but in order to make my finer point I need to spoil the end of the movie. However, dear reader, I truly don’t believe this is a movie that can be ruined through spoilers. So much of its appeal is the execution of such a specific vision, and to give one’s self over to that voice and its effect cannot be diminished through prior knowledge. It’s about the experience. Consider yourself warned, folks. Throughout the movie, the hole in Linda’s apartment ceiling becomes a sort of metaphor for her experience, an empty void. She dreams about losing herself inside the void, giving herself to the emptiness, and it’s easy to make a connection to darker impulses of self-destruction. This comes to a head at the very end, when Linda literally tries to run into the ocean to escape the troubles of her life, and the sea won’t have it, repeatedly throwing her back onto the shore. Even her attempt to escape ends up in tragic-comic slapstick. But it’s here where the movie switches gears, and we now see Linda’s daughter for the first time just as Linda is promising to be better for her. This changing of perspective effectively communicates Linda seeing her daughter, actually seeing her as a person rather than a nuisance, a peripheral voice of need and stress. The movie ends not on the harried breathing of Linda trying to calm down but on the hopeful smile of her daughter, and it might be misplaced optimism after a movie that feels plenty pessimistic, but I viewed this as a meaningful change. Even after all her struggles, even after her mistakes, there’s still the desire to do right for your loved ones, to improve.
I originally wanted to do a double review, pairing If I Had Legs with Die My Love, the newest Lynn Ramsey movie that explores the inexplicable loneliness of post-partum depression with Jennifer Lawrence trying to reconnect with her body, her sense of self, and the world as it was and is. I felt beforehand that the movies would have the connecting themes of the difficulties of motherhood, and they do, but I feel both movies are so tonally different in approach and execution that they deserve to be judged separately. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You might just be that hard-to-stomach film-experience so many have warned about (don’t expect the hamster to last long), but it’s such a transporting, exhilarating, and deeply humane vision executed to a remarkable degree of vibrant life. It’s personal and yet easily empathetic. It’s an unflinching and unsentimental portrayal not just of motherhood but of the difficulties of maintaining sanity in a world that often feels indifferent to your needs. It’s a difficult movie to watch, yes, but that doesn’t mean it lacks value and impact. If you’re brave and willing to wade through the deliberate discomfort, If I Had Legs is a remarkably good bad time at the movies.
Nate’s Grade: A
Share this:
Oh, Hi! (2025)
This feels like a charming rom-com by way of a 2010s no-budget mumblecore character-centric dramedy. Oh, Hi! follows a couple (Logan Lerman, Molly Hopkins) on a small vacation to the country to stay at an Air B&B farmhouse. They discover a closet full of bondage gear and get silly with it, strapping Lerman to the bed post. After their fun, it becomes clear there’s a dramatic misunderstanding between the couple. She thought they were an official exclusive couple. He thought they were non-exclusive and he says he’s not ready for any commitment. She leaves him in cuffs attached to the bed and promises that, in 24 hours, she can convince him to agree to be official boyfriend and girlfriend. I thought Oh, Hi! was going to be one kind of movie, maybe a kinky sex comedy (the comedic version of Gerald’s Game?), but it’s really more of a quirky relationship drama by way of kidnapping. The tone is balanced so you never feel the characters are at great risk, but it’s also hard to fathom how this turn of events will be an unorthodox relationship-builder (definitely a scenario that would play very differently if the genders were reversed). Oh, Hi! becomes more of a vehicle to reveal whether this couple should stay together or not, with Hopkins unleashing all of her romantic neuroses as a cathartic deluge. There is an organic escalation as more characters get drawn into this anxious scenario, but the movie loses its comic momentum in the last 20-30 minutes. There really is only so far you can go with this scenario, and when characters are reaching out to witchy spells to instill memory loss, we’re probably tapped out of ideas. Hopkins, who also co-wrote the script with director Sophie Brooks (The Boy Downstairs), is a charismatic find who elevates the comedy while still finding room to ground it in emotional vulnerability. Lerman can only do so much tied to a bed for most of the movie. It’s a fun little movie that finds some natural and effective comedy from its absurd kidnap-for-the-sake-of-the-relationship premise but it ultimately stalls out. Still, Oh, Hi! is full of small pleasures for a good while, from its ensemble, to its surprises, to the ever-shifting dynamic between the couple, and may prove worthwhile even for the commitment-phobic.
Nate’s Grade: B-
Share this:
Train Dreams (2025)
What a superb, tender, and deeply humanistic portrayal of life through the eyes of one man, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a logger in Idaho in the early twentieth century. His life isn’t too different from the lives of many. He wants to spend more time with his wife (Felicity Jones) and child, less time away for months on end for logging, and he has difficulty making friends in his profession of hard work and inherent transience. He feels more connection to the natural world, of which he is felling one tree at a time. The nature of the script, adapted from the 2011 novella by author Denis Johnson, is episodic, people coming in and out of this man’s personal life. The narrative feels like a collection of memories, jumping back and forth in time, connected by ideas and imagery like we do in our minds, and providing a sum total for a life lived. There’s an inherent solemnity and awe to the movie, whether it’s about the transcendence of man’s place in the world, the march of progress, or merely the pull of tragedy and love that seeps into our core being. There is a personal tragedy that defines Robert, and it is devastating to experience and process with him. Director/co-writer Clint Bentley (one half of the same creative team behind last year’s Sing Sing, one of the best movies of 2024) uses this character to represent the totality of the human experience, making the movie feel deeply felt and empathetic even decades removed from its subject. That’s because logging isn’t the movie. It’s about the people, places, and experiences that define us. William H. Macy hasn’t been this good in years. You give me a wise, elegiac narrator in the spirit of Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with such pristine details readily supplied, and I’m already a sucker for your movie. The only thing holding back Train Dreams for me was that post-tragedy doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves. You’d expect the second half of the movie would be the process of grieving and coming to terms, and in essence it is, but the movie is far less direct about its processing, which I felt was a minor misstep for an overall great movie.
Nate’’s Grade: A-
Share this:
Keeper (2025)
Director Osgood Perkins is becoming an indie horror household name for Neon with three releases in less than 18 months, each wildly different in approach. Granted, Keeper is more in league with Longlegs than The Monkey, which for me is the less appealing comparison. There really isn’t a whole lot to Keeper in style, theme, or execution. It stars Tatiana Maslany (The Monkey, She Hulk) as a woman visiting her boyfriend’s family cabin in the woods. He leaves for extended periods of time and she starts seeing weird visions of dead women and strange and sinister specters. Until the reveal with fifteen minutes to go, the movie is all ponderous atmospheric noodling, with Maslany slowly losing her mind. There’s a few nifty images but the eventual connection to all this mumbo jumbo is pretty outlandish while at the same time feeling pedestrian, delivered with an unintentionally funny expository speech spelling out everything. All this slow burn anticipation for that? I wish there was more concentration on the main character’s personal psychology beyond lingering doubts she has over whether her boyfriend might be cheating. That’s a fairly humdrum conflict given everything (just go home, girl) and makes the character more a mitigating reflection of him rather than her own character with her own issues and history. Some of the eventual monster designs are nightmarish and memorable but for me it was too-little too-late. I wanted better for Maslany and a horror movie that had more going on under the surface to justify its dithering atmosphere. Keeper is a poorly paced and ultimately thin horror movie better left alone and forgotten.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Hell of a Summer (2025)
You’ve likely seen this kind of movie before, and co-stars/co-writers/co-directors Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard (yes, the Stranger Things actor has directed a movie by age 19) are counting on that. Hell of a Summer is a summer camp slasher movie with horny camp counselors trying to score before they get murdered by a masked assailant. The tone, however, is decidedly more heightened and goofy, aiming for more of an unassailable offbeat comedy like Wet Hot American Summer. It works because the horror/thriller elements, and the general mystery of who is the real killer, are never really that compelling, clear pastiche but no more than that. The real entertainment value comes from the silly characters navigating familiar teen troubles like relationships, growing independence, and the scary uncertainty of being an adult, with a heightened seriousness amidst the ridiculous, approaching camp-levels but without being obnoxiously self-aware. That’s why I credit Wet Hot American Summer as its primary influence. There’s a loosely experimental yet admirably confident air to the presentation. Even when the jokes aren’t landing or the pastiche is getting old, I held out with hope that another strange moment might catch my fancy in short order, like Wolfhard being obsessed with the hydration of his peers, or Bryk having a crisis of self-doubt when people suggest the killer is targeting the “hottest counselors” and he’s not been targeted yet. It makes for a silly, inoffensive bauble of a movie with clear affection for its genre influences. If you can’t get on the movie’s comic wavelength, it will make for a slog of 90 minutes. Hell of a Summer might make you smile enough to warrant one pleasant viewing, and who knows, this might just be the beginning of Finn Wolfhard, directing titan.
Nate’s Grade: C+
nathanzoebl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.