Streaming on Shudder and AMC+ from Monday 16 June

Beneath its softly lit salons and the hushed intimacy of late-night haircuts, The Stylist carves out something far more unsettling: a psychological portrait of aching loneliness, identity collapse, and the monstrous lengths some will go to feel like they belong. Directed with eerie precision by Jill Gevargizian, this feature-length adaptation of her acclaimed short film offers a muted but effective horror tale that leans more into sadness than shocks.

Claire (Najarra Townsend) is a woman adrift—quiet, awkward, desperate to connect—but with a hunger that’s gone grotesquely unmet. She doesn’t just cut hair. She scalps. Each kill is not about violence for its own sake, but a tragic, chilling attempt to wear someone else’s life. And that’s where The Stylist cuts deepest—not in the gore, but in its exploration of identity as a fragile performance, and what happens when someone can no longer locate their own sense of self.

Enter Olivia (Brea Grant), an affable, outgoing bride-to-be who naively invites Claire deeper into her world. From there, the spiral is slow and agonising. What starts as admiration curdles into obsession. Claire’s need to be Olivia isn’t just jealousy—it’s pathological yearning. Her scalping isn’t about trophies in the serial killer sense. It’s about transference. Taking the one thing a person can’t fake: their presence, their social ease, their confidence. Claire doesn’t want to destroy—she wants to inhabit.

Townsend delivers a superb, painfully internal performance. Her Claire is meek but never blank—each nervous twitch and downward glance revealing someone quietly screaming behind her skin. She doesn’t play the killer as a monster, but as a woman in mourning—for connection, for warmth, for identity. It’s a performance that sticks with you. Brea Grant, meanwhile, plays Olivia with a brightness that never tips into caricature, making her slow realisation all the more tragic.

Stylistically, the film is polished, with an elegant aesthetic that contrasts beautifully with its macabre subject matter. There are echoes of Maniac, May, even Single White Female, but The Stylist stands on its own, particularly in how grounded its emotional horror remains. The mood is heavy, sometimes to a fault, with pacing that occasionally feels listless rather than deliberate. Still, the thematic undercurrents—how we mask our emptiness, how we covet others’ confidence like currency—are deeply resonant.

The Prognosis:

There’s a sadness in the scissors. In the need to be seen. In the horror of invisibility. The Stylist doesn’t reinvent the horror genre, but it delivers something more haunting than expected: a quiet eulogy for those who never quite found their place, and the darkness that fills the void.

• Saul Muerte