Category Archives: Movie review

Blood in the Water: Killer Whale Goes for the Throat

17 Tuesday Feb 2026

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There’s an compelling idea lurking beneath Killer Whale: a trauma drama dressed up as a creature feature. Director Jo-Anne Brechin frames her survival thriller around grief, survivor’s guilt and damaged ambition, using the rampaging orca less as a monster and more as an externalisation of unresolved pain. It’s a thoughtful angle in theory — but one that struggles to stay afloat amid the film’s more formulaic genre trappings.

The story follows Maddie (Virginia Gardner), a gifted cellist whose life stalls after a violent robbery leaves her hearing impaired and her boyfriend dead. A year later, a guilt-ridden holiday to Thailand with her friend Trish (Mel Jarnson) spirals into nightmare territory when an abused captive orca is unleashed into a secluded lagoon. What begins as an emotional reckoning quickly pivots into familiar killer-creature beats: stranded swimmers, tightening geography, and a predator circling with mechanical persistence.

Brechin deserves credit for attempting to graft psychological weight onto a well-worn subgenre. The early passages, which explore Maddie’s fractured identity and her complicated relationship with sound and silence, hint at a more introspective film. Gardner carries these quieter moments with conviction, grounding the character’s grief in a way that feels authentic. Yet once the survival mechanics kick in, the emotional throughline becomes increasingly submerged beneath routine suspense staging.

Compared to the great killer-creature touchstones — from the elegant dread of Jaws to the lean efficiency of modern aquatic thrillers — Killer Whale feels caught between ambitions. The orca itself is an effective symbol of exploitation and rage, but the visual execution varies wildly, with tension undercut by uneven effects and repetitive attack rhythms. The lagoon setting promises claustrophobia but rarely capitalises on its full spatial potential, resulting in sequences that feel more cyclical than escalating.

What works best is the film’s thematic intent: the suggestion that trauma, like a wounded animal, will keep circling until confronted. What doesn’t is the script’s tendency to spell out these ideas while relying on stock genre decisions that blunt their impact. Characters make frustrating choices less out of psychological necessity than narrative convenience, and the pacing sags in a middle stretch that should be tightening the screws.

The Prognosis:

Killer Whale never entirely bores, and its central metaphor gives it a faint pulse beyond standard creature-feature thrills. But the disconnect between its emotional aspirations and its execution leaves it feeling like a sketch of a stronger film — one where trauma and terror might have truly reinforced each other, rather than competing for the spotlight.

  • Saul Muerte

Killer Whale will be available to rent on digital platforms from Feb 20.

Engineered Hearts: Honey Bunch and the Science of Perfect Love

13 Friday Feb 2026

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A love story refracted through broken memory and clinical obsession, Honey Bunch is a coolly unsettling chamber piece that folds romance into speculative body horror. Directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, the film explores the fragile architecture of intimacy with a precision that feels both surgical and deeply human.

Diana awakens in transit, ferried by her husband toward a remote experimental trauma facility buried in the wilderness. The reason for the journey has slipped from her grasp, and that absence becomes the film’s central engine. Memory in Honey Bunch is treated not as a passive repository but as contested territory — something that can be edited, erased, and repurposed in the pursuit of an idealised union. As fragments return, so too do the sinister implications of her marriage, and the film gradually reveals a macabre scientific underworld obsessed with engineering perfect compatibility.

The performances anchor the film’s speculative conceits in bruising emotional reality. Grace Glowicki gives a finely calibrated turn as Diana, charting her character’s oscillation between vulnerability and dawning suspicion with minute physical detail. Opposite her, Ben Petrie plays the husband with a carefully modulated ambiguity, his tenderness always shadowed by something clinical and withholding. The supporting presence of Jason Isaacs and Kate Dickie deepens the film’s atmosphere of institutional unease; both lend gravitas to a world where love has been subjected to experimental scrutiny.

Visually, the film is austere and tactile. The wilderness setting feels less like an escape than a sealed laboratory, its natural beauty contrasting sharply with the antiseptic interiors of the facility. Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer construct a series of twists that spiral into a macabre meditation on the pursuit of soulmates — a quest that tests the ethical boundaries of devotion. Their direction favours mood over spectacle, allowing dread to accumulate in quiet spaces and loaded silences.

What elevates Honey Bunch is its insistence on imperfection. Beneath its science-fiction trappings lies a probing question: if love is predicated on accepting another’s flaws, what happens when technology promises to sand those flaws away? The film’s answer is neither simple nor comforting. Instead, it presents a haunting vision of romance strained through the machinery of control, where the desire for unity risks erasing the very qualities that make connection meaningful.

The Prognosis:

Honey Bunch stands as a striking synthesis of performance and idea — a cerebral, emotionally resonant work that twists the language of genre into a meditation on memory, identity, and the dangerous allure of engineered love.

  • Saul Muerte

Honey Bunch streams on Shudder from Jan 13.

Lord of Misrule (2025) and the Beautiful Trap of Folk Horror

01 Sunday Feb 2026

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Harvest festivals have often provided a sense of eternal dread in horror cinema. They promise abundance, fertility, renewal — and yet so often conceal rot beneath the ribbons. Lord of Misrule arrives knowingly into that lineage, stepping barefoot into the blood-soaked soil cultivated by The Wicker Man, The Witch, Midsommar, and their increasingly crowded offspring. It is a film deeply aware of the terrain it treads, and for much of its runtime, that awareness works in its favour.

Set within a secluded village bound by tradition and silence, the film opens with a familiar yet potent inciting wound: the disappearance of the daughter of the town’s new priest during the annual harvest festival. From that absence, Lord of Misrule builds a creeping architecture of dread — one not reliant on jump scares or grotesquerie, but on the slow realisation that this town does not merely remember its past… it still feeds it.

Folk Horror with its Roots Intact

What distinguishes Lord of Misrule from lesser folk horror pastiches is its patience. The film allows itself to breathe within the rhythms of rural life — the rituals, the half-smiles, the whispered warnings that feel less like exposition than confession. There is a welcome refusal to rush headlong into spectacle; instead, dread accumulates in glances, silences, and the heavy implication that something ancient still demands tribute.

The concept itself is elegantly simple: a malevolent spirit bound to the land, sustained through sacrifice, disguised beneath centuries of polite ceremony. It is horror not as invasion, but as inheritance — evil not arriving from without, but preserved lovingly from within. This thematic alignment with generational guilt and communal complicity places Lord of Misrule firmly within folk horror’s most enduring philosophical concerns.

Anchored by Flesh and Bone

Central to the film’s effectiveness are its performances, which elevate the material beyond mere genre exercise.

Tuppence Middleton delivers a measured, emotionally grounded performance that anchors the film’s more ethereal elements. She brings a quiet steel to her role — grief without hysteria, resolve without bombast — allowing the horror to orbit her rather than overwhelm her. She becomes the audience’s surrogate not through fear, but through endurance.

Ralph Ineson, meanwhile, is perfectly cast. His voice alone seems carved from oak and grave soil, and he carries the weight of rural menace with effortless authority. Ineson understands folk horror instinctively: his presence suggests not villainy, but inevitability — as though the land itself has learned how to speak through him.

Together, Middleton and Ineson provide the film with its most compelling dynamic: modern skepticism locked in slow collision with ritualistic fatalism.

When the Earth Cracks

Yet for all its atmospheric command, Lord of Misrule ultimately stumbles where folk horror so often does — in its final act.

After spending so long carefully cultivating ambiguity, dread, and moral tension, the film opts for a more conventional and hurried resolution. The climax, rather than deepening the film’s thematic unease, simplifies it. What was once uncanny becomes explicit; what was once philosophical becomes procedural. The film trades unease for explanation, dread for closure — and in doing so, loses some of the strange power it so patiently summoned.

This is not a disastrous collapse, but it is a deflating one. The third act feels less like a natural culmination than a narrative obligation — as though the film, having wandered confidently into ancient woods, suddenly remembered it had to find its way back out.

A Worthy Addition to the Circle

Still, to dwell solely on its shortcomings would be to ignore what Lord of Misrule accomplishes with confidence and restraint. In an era where folk horror has become increasingly stylised and self-conscious, the film remains refreshingly earnest. It is not ironic. It is not detached. It believes in its mythology — and that belief carries it far, even when its footing falters.

Lord of Misrule stands as a strong, if imperfect, addition to contemporary folk horror. It may not redefine the genre, but it respects it deeply — and in a landscape crowded with hollow ritual and empty symbolism, that alone makes it worth entering the circle.

  • Saul Muerte

LORD OF MISRULE will be available to Rent or buy on Digital at: Apple TV, Prime Video, Google TV, YouTube, Fetch (AU), Foxtel Store (AU), SKY Store (NZ), and Neon (NZ). Own it on DVD at JB Hi-Fi and Sanity from FEBRUARY 4TH!

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