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Mother of Flies (2025) and the Fragile Alchemy of Family-Made Folk Horror

19 Monday Jan 2026

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There is something inherently seductive about family-made cinema. Not merely collaborative, not simply economical, but almost ritualistic in nature — as if filmmaking itself becomes a shared incantation passed between bloodlines. Few modern genre outfits embody this notion more fiercely than the Adams family. With Hellbender, they didn’t just announce themselves; they howled their arrival, carving a space within contemporary folk horror that felt raw, feral, and authentically unpolished.

Mother of Flies, however, arrives burdened by that legacy — and perhaps undone by it.

Horror in the Blood

John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams have, across their work, demonstrated a fascination with witchcraft, bodily sacrifice, inherited trauma, and the occult as something lived-in rather than merely aesthetic. Their films feel less written than unearthed, less scripted than summoned. In Hellbender, this approach reached its most potent expression: a coming-of-age tale steeped in pagan fury, where mother-daughter dynamics merged seamlessly with mythic inheritance. It felt dangerous. It felt discovered.

That sense of discovery is precisely what Mother of Flies struggles to replicate.

Once again, the Adams family retreat into the woods, this time following a young woman seeking salvation from a terminal diagnosis through dark magic and the guidance of a reclusive witch. It is fertile soil for their obsessions — body, ritual, desperation, the cost of power — yet the film rarely sinks its claws into them with conviction.

A Spell Half-Cast

Where Hellbender burned fast and bright, Mother of Flies smoulders — often beautifully, but frustratingly without ignition.

Atmospherically, the film remains tactile and sincere. There is a genuine commitment to texture here: the forest breathes, the rituals feel weighty, the blood not merely decorative but symbolic. The Adams family’s sincerity is never in question — they are filmmakers who believe deeply in what they are conjuring, and that faith lends the film moments of eerie gravitas.

Yet structurally, the film meanders far too long through its incantations, circling its themes without ever quite piercing them. Scenes linger where they should tighten. Symbolism repeats where it should escalate. What begins as hypnotic gradually becomes inert.

It is only in the final act — when consequences are finally allowed to surface — that Mother of Flies truly stirs. Here, the Adams family remind us of their potency: horror not as spectacle, but as reckoning. Unfortunately, by then, the film has already tested the audience’s patience too severely.

The Problem of Inherited Myth

This raises a more curious question about family-made horror itself.

There is something uniquely powerful about horror crafted by those bound not only by contracts, but by blood. Shared history allows shorthand storytelling. It encourages risk. It produces mythology that feels intimate rather than manufactured. We see echoes of this in other sibling or bloodline creatives — the Phillippou Brothers’ ferocious Talk To Me, even the generational echoes of Cronenbergian body horror.

But such intimacy comes with its own danger: when mythology becomes inherited rather than earned, ritual risks becoming repetition. Aesthetic replaces terror. Gesture replaces consequence.

Mother of Flies occasionally feels like the Adams family performing their own mythology, rather than discovering something new within it.

The Fragility of Folk Horror

Folk horror thrives on the illusion of something uncovered — an ancient story clawed from the soil rather than assembled in post-production. Once codified, once too self-aware, it becomes perilously close to costumed reverence. Hellbender felt dangerous because it seemed accidental, like lightning captured in a bottle. Mother of Flies feels careful by comparison — reverent, controlled, and therefore less frightening.

This does not make it a failure, but it does make it a frustrating experience — one brimming with potential, sincerity, and visual mood, yet restrained by its own solemnity.

Still Watching the Woods

Mother of Flies ultimately lands as a disappointment — not because it lacks craft or ambition, but because it fails to evolve the dark language the Adams family once spoke so fluently. And yet, to dismiss it outright would be to misunderstand its place in the larger arc of their work.

The Adams family remain one of indie horror’s most compelling bloodlines. Even in misstep, they conjure worlds few others dare to inhabit so sincerely. In a genre obsessed with inheritance, curses, and legacy, that alone keeps them worth following — back into the woods, back toward the firelight, back toward whatever spell they choose to cast next.

  • Saul Muerte

Mother of Flies is available to stream on Shudder from Fri 23rd Jan.

Paint-by-Numbers Panic: Primate and the Perils of Playing It Safe

13 Tuesday Jan 2026

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Johannes Roberts has made a career out of placing young bodies in enclosed spaces and seeing what breaks first. From the submerged panic of 47 Meters Down to the neon-lit attrition of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, his cinema is built on pressure systems: ticking clocks, shrinking environments, and protagonists perpetually one bad decision away from catastrophe. Primate continues this fixation almost to the point of self-parody, trapping its cast of college-aged characters in a chlorine-blue nightmare where fear, logic, and common sense all slowly evaporate.

The premise is lean to the point of austerity. Lucy returns home from college to reconnect with her fractured family and their long-time pet chimp, Ben. A pool party goes awry, Ben contracts rabies, and the animal’s sudden shift from domestic novelty to feral threat pushes the film into siege mode. Friends barricade themselves in and around a swimming pool, devising increasingly desperate strategies to outlast a creature that is stronger, faster, and far less forgiving than they are. It’s a setup that screams exploitation, but Roberts approaches it with the clean, functional competence that has become his calling card.

To the film’s credit, Primate is often tense. Roberts understands spatial geography well, and the poolside setting is used with a claustrophobic clarity that keeps the action readable. The director’s knack for escalation — another hallmark of his work — ensures that the chimp’s attacks arrive with bruising force, and the practical effects are commendably gnarly. There are moments where the violence lands hard, not because it’s shocking, but because it feels cruelly inevitable.

Yet inevitability is also Primate’s greatest weakness. This is a paint-by-numbers survival thriller that never strays from its template. Characterisation is skeletal, dialogue often grating, and the decision-making of the besieged teens frequently borders on self-sabotage. Rather than grinding the audience through fear, the film more often grinds their teeth through frustration, as tension gives way to repetition and contrivance.

Roberts’ fascination with teens in peril remains intact, but here it feels rote rather than revealing. Where his better work finds momentum in relentless pacing, Primate stalls, circling the same beats without deepening its stakes or themes. The chimp becomes less a symbol of uncontrollable nature or domestic denial and more a blunt instrument deployed whenever the film needs a jolt.

The Prognosis:

Primate is competent but hollow — a functional creature feature with flashes of brutality and tension, undone by its refusal to evolve beyond familiar rhythms. It’s not without craft, but it’s also not without fatigue. A rabid idea, executed safely, and ultimately remembered less for its bite than for how long it takes to let go.

  • Saul Muerte

Link (1986) — When Intelligence Turns Hostile

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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Released in the mid-1980s, when natural horror and animal-attack films were enjoying a second life on VHS and late-night television, Link occupies an unusual and often overlooked position within the killer ape subgenre. Directed by Richard Franklin—best known for his Hitchcockian leanings and his brief but curious detour into franchise horror with Psycho II—the film is less interested in primal savagery than in the unnerving implications of intelligence, hierarchy, and control.

The setup flirts with eccentricity. Graduate student Jane Chase arrives at the isolated home of an ageing zoology professor, only to discover that the household hierarchy has already been rewritten. The professor’s chimpanzees operate with eerie autonomy, while Link, an elderly orangutan dressed and treated like a gentleman’s butler, observes quietly from the margins. When one chimp is found dead and the professor vanishes, Franklin slowly inverts the power dynamic. Jane is no longer studying behaviour—she is subject to it.

Franklin directs Link with a measured, classical restraint that sets it apart from the more exploitative entries in the killer ape cycle. There is little in the way of sensational gore or overt shock tactics. Instead, tension is built through framing, pacing, and a creeping sense of domestic invasion. The house becomes a laboratory, and Jane its most vulnerable test subject. The horror emerges not from sudden violence but from the dawning realisation that the apes understand far more than they should—and may be capable of resentment, planning, and cruelty.

Elisabeth Shue, still early in her career, delivers a performance that anchors the film’s escalating unease. Her Jane is intelligent and resourceful, but never impervious. Shue excels at conveying fear through restraint, allowing the terror to register in hesitation and watchfulness rather than outright hysteria. It’s a performance that would foreshadow her later genre credibility, grounding increasingly absurd situations in emotional reality.

Terence Stamp, meanwhile, brings an off-kilter gravitas to the role of the eccentric professor. Though his screen time is limited, his presence lingers over the film, lending it an air of intellectual arrogance and ethical negligence. Stamp embodies a familiar horror archetype: the man of science who mistakes authority for control, and curiosity for dominion. His disappearance feels less like a mystery than an inevitability.

Within the broader killer ape genre, Link sits closer to Monkey Shines than to more bombastic entries like Congo or Rampage. This is not a film about nature striking back in spectacular fashion, nor is it interested in giant monsters or environmental collapse. Instead, Link taps into a subtler fear—the idea that intelligence, once nurtured and confined, may turn possessive and violent when its boundaries are tested.

When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

That said, the film is not without its shortcomings. The third act leans into melodrama, and the film’s central conceit occasionally strains credulity. The mechanics of ape behaviour are pushed beyond plausibility, and some of the symbolism—particularly around class, servitude, and dominance—remains underdeveloped. Franklin’s restraint, while admirable, sometimes blunts the film’s impact, leaving it hovering between psychological thriller and creature feature without fully committing to either.

Viewed in retrospect, Link is a solid, thoughtful entry in the killer ape canon—more curious than terrifying, more cerebral than visceral. It lacks the cultural weight of Planet of the Apes or the grindhouse audacity of exploitation-era ape horror, but it compensates with atmosphere, performance, and an unsettling moral undercurrent.

For readers interested in the broader lineage of killer ape cinema—where Link fits alongside films that interrogate humanity’s uneasy relationship with intelligence, dominance, and the natural world—this film acts as a quiet but essential connective tissue, bridging prestige thrillers and pulp horror traditions.

The Prognosis:

A restrained, intelligent thriller that favours implication over excess, Link remains a peculiar but worthwhile footnote in the long, uneasy history of killer apes on screen.

  • Saul Muerte

Together (2025) — Love, Loss, and the Horror of Becoming One

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Michael Shanks’ Together arrives draped in the familiar trappings of modern relationship horror: an isolated move, emotional fractures laid bare, and the suggestion that intimacy itself might be the most dangerous terrain of all. What distinguishes the film—at least initially—is its willingness to literalise emotional dependency through supernatural means, turning the language of co-dependence into something disturbingly corporeal.

The story centres on a couple already fraying at the edges, their relocation to the countryside framed less as fresh start than slow retreat. Shanks smartly uses the rural setting as an amplifier rather than a cause, isolating the pair in a space where grievances echo and silences grow heavy. When the supernatural intrusion arrives, it does not feel like an external threat so much as an acceleration of tensions already present. Love, here, is not broken—it is mutating.

At its best, Together is sharply observant about the quiet violences couples inflict on one another in the name of closeness. The film’s central conceit—an “extreme transformation” of love and flesh—is handled with a commitment to physical horror that aligns it with the recent wave of intimacy-as-body-horror cinema. Shanks stages these moments with an unflinching eye, allowing discomfort to linger rather than rushing toward release. The implication is clear: to merge completely is to erase boundaries, and erasure is rarely benign.

Where the film falters is in its balance between metaphor and mechanics. The supernatural rules remain hazy, and while ambiguity suits the emotional material, it occasionally undermines narrative momentum. There’s a sense that Together knows precisely what it wants to say about relationships, but struggles to sustain tension once its thesis has been made flesh. The final stretch, in particular, leans heavily on repetition, circling its ideas rather than deepening them.

Still, Shanks deserves credit for resisting easy catharsis. Together refuses to offer a clean moral or a redemptive escape hatch. Its vision of love is not romanticised nor outright condemned—it is presented as something dangerous precisely because it is so often mistaken for safety. The horror comes not from the supernatural encounter itself, but from the realisation that devotion, unchecked, can become a kind of possession.

The Prognosis:

Uneven but thoughtful, Together is a grim meditation on intimacy and identity, using body horror to expose the cost of losing oneself in another—even when the invitation sounds like love.

  • Saul Muerte

Keeper (2025) — Osgood Perkins and the Slow Bleed of Mythic Terror

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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Osgood Perkins has never been interested in horror as spectacle. His films drift, linger, and rot from the inside out, favouring mood over momentum and suggestion over shock. Keeper finds the director once again circling his most enduring fixations—the paranormal, the mythic, and the occult—and when he commits fully to these shadowy preoccupations, the results are among his most unsettling to date.

The premise is deceptively simple. Liz and Malcolm retreat to a secluded cabin for an anniversary weekend, a familiar setup that Perkins treats less as narrative engine than ritual initiation. When Malcolm abruptly returns to the city, the film fractures, leaving Liz alone in a space that begins to feel less like a holiday retreat and more like a consecrated site. What follows is not a barrage of scares but a slow accretion of dread, as the cabin reveals itself to be a vessel for something ancient, watchful, and profoundly uninterested in human morality.

Perkins’ greatest strength has always been his willingness to let horror breathe. Like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel, Keeper operates on a frequency closer to folklore than modern genre mechanics. The evil here is not noisy or demonstrative; it is embedded, inherited, and ritualistic. The cabin feels less haunted than kept—maintained by forces that predate Liz’s arrival and will endure long after she’s gone. Perkins paints this world with a vivid but restrained brush, using sound design, negative space, and repetition to suggest a cosmology that remains tantalisingly opaque.

Tatiana Maslany anchors the film with a performance of remarkable control. Isolated for much of the runtime, she carries Keeper through micro-expressions, physical tension, and an ever-shifting relationship to her surroundings. Her Liz is neither hysterical nor heroic; she is observant, increasingly wary, and quietly devastated as the rules of reality begin to slip. Maslany understands Perkins’ rhythms, allowing fear to register not as reaction but as recognition—an awareness that something has always been wrong here.

If the film falters, it’s in its refusal to fully sharpen its final act. Perkins’ devotion to ambiguity, while thematically consistent, occasionally blunts the emotional impact. There are moments where the mythology feels more gestured at than excavated, and viewers seeking narrative closure may find the ending frustratingly elusive. Yet this, too, feels intentional. Keeper is not about defeating evil or escaping it, but about realising one’s place within a larger, indifferent order.

In the context of Perkins’ body of work, Keeper stands as a confident reaffirmation of his obsessions. When he centres his stories on the occult and the mythic, he is capable of conjuring horror that feels timeless, intimate, and deeply unclean. This is a film that seeps rather than strikes, lingers rather than lunges.

The Prognosis:

A haunting, slow-burning descent into ritual and isolation, Keeper confirms Osgood Perkins as one of modern horror’s most singular—and uncompromising—voices.

  • Saul Muerte

The Strangers: Chapter 2 (2025) — When Survival Becomes Sequelitis

20 Saturday Dec 2025

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The Strangers was once terrifying precisely because it refused to explain itself. Masks without motive. Violence without catharsis. Bryan Bertino’s original film understood that randomness is the most unsettling horror of all. The Strangers: Chapter 2, directed by Renny Harlin, represents the franchise’s continued drift away from that ethos—an increasingly desperate attempt to stretch a concept built on nihilistic simplicity into an ongoing mythology it was never designed to sustain.

Picking up immediately after the events of Chapter 1, the film leans hard into continuation. Maya survived. That alone already strains the fatalistic purity of the original premise, but Chapter 2 doubles down: the Strangers are no longer abstract forces of intrusion, but pursuers with intent, persistence, and—most damagingly—narrative obligation. Survival, we’re told, was just the beginning. Unfortunately, so was the creative erosion.

Harlin, a director long associated with bombastic escalation (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger), approaches the material with a franchise mindset rather than a conceptual one. The result is a film that confuses momentum for menace. The stalking becomes repetitive, the violence procedural, and the sense of existential dread gives way to something closer to slasher mechanics. The masks are still there, but the mystery behind them has been hollowed out.

The film’s most baffling misstep arrives midway through with a moment so tonally deranged it threatens to derail the entire enterprise: Maya’s encounter with a boar, framed with portentous symbolism and played as some kind of primal omen. It’s a genuine what-the-hell-am-I-watching beat—the precise moment the film abandons any remaining psychological coherence and wanders off into horror non sequitur. What should have been stripped-back terror curdles into accidental surrealism, as if the film briefly mistakes itself for an arthouse allegory before snapping back to franchise obligation.

The latter half retreats into an even more familiar, and equally uninspired, space: the hospital. The nods to Halloween II are unmistakable—fluorescent corridors, wounded survivor, killer(s) returning to finish the job—but where Carpenter and Rosenthal used the setting to extend a nightmarish inevitability, Chapter 2 uses it as connective tissue. The hospital becomes less a space of vulnerability than a narrative checkpoint, a place where the franchise can pause, reset, and prepare itself for further chapters.

This is the core problem: The Strangers was never meant to be episodic. Its power lay in finality. In meaninglessness. In the suggestion that violence doesn’t continue because it must, but because it can. By forcing continuation, Chapter 2 drains the concept of its philosophical cruelty. The Strangers don’t feel inevitable anymore—they feel contractual.

By the time the film limps to its conclusion, it’s clear that the franchise is running on fumes. What was once cold, terrifying minimalism has become overextended, over-explained, and increasingly absurd. The boar may be the most obvious sign that the film has gone off the rails, but the real damage was done the moment The Strangers decided it needed chapters at all.

The Prognosis:

A sequel that mistakes persistence for purpose, and mythology for menace—proof that some doors, once closed, should stay that way.

  • Saul Muerte

The Home (2025) — Senility, Surveillance, and the Long Memory of Evil

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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James DeMonaco has always been fascinated by systems—how they rot, how they fail, and how violence seeps through their cracks. From the blunt social allegory of The Purge to the leaner, meaner contours of his later work, DeMonaco’s cinema operates in a state of controlled paranoia, convinced that institutions are not safeguards but incubators. The Home feels like a natural extension of that worldview, a film obsessed with corridors, rules, and the slow revelation that something malignant is being politely maintained behind closed doors.

The premise is deceptively modest. A troubled drifter takes a job at a retirement home. The residents are strange. The caretakers are stranger. The fourth floor is forbidden. This is familiar territory—The Home traffics in the grammar of institutional horror—but DeMonaco filters it through a jittery, conspiratorial lens. The building is less a location than a system of concealment, its bland hallways buzzing with the low-grade menace of withheld information. Every locked door feels like a threat. Every smile reads as camouflage.

The film’s manic energy is largely carried by Pete Davidson, whose casting initially seems like provocation but gradually reveals a sharp, unsettling logic. Davidson plays the protagonist as a man permanently braced for impact, his body language twitchy, his eyes scanning for exits that may or may not exist. He weaponises his familiar cadences—half-joking, half-defensive—until they curdle into something desperate. This is Davidson stripped of irony, and while the performance is uneven, it is never uninteresting. His character’s foster-care trauma bleeds into the film’s institutional dread, turning the retirement home into a warped echo of the systems that failed him as a child.

DeMonaco leans hard into paranoia, sometimes to the film’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment. The Home is thick with suggestion—rituals half-glimpsed, whispers behind doors, glances held a second too long—but it often mistakes accumulation for escalation. The mystery coils inward, doubling back on itself, feeding the sense that the protagonist may be uncovering a conspiracy or simply unraveling under its weight. The film wants to exist in that uncertainty, but its third act can’t quite resist explanation, flattening some of the unease it works so diligently to cultivate.

Visually, the film is austere and oppressive. The retirement home is rendered as a liminal space where time has curdled—neither alive nor dead, neither nurturing nor openly hostile. DeMonaco’s camera prowls rather than observes, peering down hallways like it expects to be noticed. The forbidden fourth floor looms as an almost abstract concept, a vertical metaphor for buried memory and institutional secrecy that the film circles obsessively.

Yet for all its ambition, The Home struggles to fully reconcile its ideas. The social commentary—about neglect, aging, and the expendability of those who fall through institutional cracks—is present but underdeveloped. DeMonaco gestures toward something corrosive and systemic, but the film’s manic intensity sometimes drowns out its own argument. What remains is a mood piece that crackles with unease but lacks the narrative clarity to make its paranoia feel truly revelatory.

The Home is not a failure so much as an overextended diagnosis. It captures the sensation of discovering that the rules you trusted were never meant to protect you, but it can’t quite land the final indictment. Still, in its jittery energy, uneasy performance, and claustrophobic design, it offers a compelling if flawed entry in DeMonaco’s ongoing exploration of American institutions as haunted houses.

The Prognosis:

A film that trembles with suspicion and half-remembered trauma—unnerving in the moment, frustrating in retrospect, and never entirely at ease with its own revelations.

  • Saul Muerte

Beast of War (2025) — Sharks, Sweat, and Survival at the Edge of Roache-Turner’s Cinema

15 Monday Dec 2025

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Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

  • Saul Muerte

Shelby Oaks (2025) — When Found Footage Loses the Plot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

  • Saul Muerte

Del Toro Reanimates a Classic — But Not Without Stitches Showing

15 Saturday Nov 2025

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Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives with the inevitability of myth. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attuned to the poetry of monsters, and fewer still have built an oeuvre so devoted to the wounded, the wondrous, and the lonely. From Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water, del Toro has repeatedly crafted worlds where the grotesque becomes tender and the inhuman becomes a mirror. In many ways, Frankenstein should have been his ultimate expression. And yet, despite moments of breathtaking beauty, the film feels curiously unmoored from the gothic, romantic, and macabre heart of Mary Shelley’s novel.

Oscar Isaac delivers a volatile, almost venomous Victor Frankenstein — a man whose brilliance curdles into arrogance long before his creation opens its eyes. His performance pushes Victor into deliberately detestable territory, stripping away any lingering ambiguity and recasting him as a man driven less by intellectual yearning and more by a narcissistic hunger to be remembered. It is a bold interpretation, if not entirely a sympathetic one. Mia Goth, by contrast, seems misaligned with the film’s emotional wavelength; her Elizabeth feels spectral not in a tragic, Shelleyan sense, but in a way that leaves her displaced, as though the world around her was calibrated to a frequency she cannot quite inhabit.

Visually, however, Frankenstein is nothing short of sumptuous. Del Toro orchestrates frames that glow with painterly chiaroscuro — all bruise-blue moonlight, cathedral shadows, and the soft, funereal glow of candlelit laboratories. The creature’s awakening is a moment of pure cinema, a fusion of tactile prosthetics and operatic staging that reminds us why del Toro remains one of the most distinct visual fantasists working today. His fascination with the act of creation — as miracle, as violation — pulses through every coil of wire and stitched sinew.

But it is precisely here that the film begins to diverge from Shelley’s vision. Del Toro embellishes the narrative with new mythologies, symbolic digressions, and philosophical asides that, while intriguing, often pull the story away from its emotional core. Shelley’s novel is a haunting meditation on responsibility and alienation, its tragedy rooted in the fragile bond between creator and creation. Del Toro’s additions, though imaginative, diffuse this intimacy. The more the film expands outward — into backstory, lore, and ornate world-building — the further it drifts from the stark, romantic terror that makes Frankenstein endure.

This impulse is not new in del Toro’s cinema. His career is defined by a tension between narrative simplicity and imaginative excess. His greatest works embrace that balance: the aching solitude of The Devil’s Backbone, the fairy-tale fatalism of Pan’s Labyrinth, the delicate monstrosity of The Shape of Water. In Frankenstein, however, the scales tip slightly too far toward embellishment. The result is a film that is still enthralling to behold, but one that sometimes mutates the story so much that its thematic marrow — creation as curse, loneliness as inheritance — becomes diluted.

Still, even when it falters, del Toro’s Frankenstein contains moments of exquisite power: the creature standing beneath a storm-lit sky, grappling with consciousness; Victor, trembling not with triumph but with the first stirrings of dread; the quiet spaces where the monster reaches toward a world that will not reach back. These sequences remind us of what del Toro understands so deeply — that monsters are never the true horrors, but rather reflections of what humanity refuses to confront.

The Prognosis:

Frankenstein may not be the definitive adaptation its pedigree suggests. But as a work of del Toro’s imagination — a meditation on creation, isolation, and the fantastical — it is still compelling, still resonant, and still marked by the unmistakable touch of a filmmaker who has spent his career searching for beauty in the broken.

  • Saul Muerte