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The Golden Scalpel Awards 2025

27 Saturday Dec 2025

Posted by in Best Movies and Shows

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Horror as Discipline, Horror as Diagnosis

Horror cinema in 2025 proved itself less interested in spectacle than in excavation. Across continents and budgets, the year’s most vital films treated fear not as an external shock but as a condition embedded in history, technology, power, and the body itself. Monsters, when they appeared at all, were often secondary to systems: inheritance, authority, intimacy, and the quiet violence of belief.

The Golden Scalpel Awards were conceived not as a popularity contest, nor as an exercise in shock valorisation, but as a critical intervention — an attempt to assess horror cinema as a serious artistic and ideological practice. These awards privilege films that cut rather than bludgeon; works that understand dread as something cumulative, ethical, and often unresolved. Performance, direction, and form are judged not by extremity, but by precision.

In keeping with that ethos, categories that reduce complexity to provocation have been deliberately avoided. There is no “Most Disturbing” award here. Disturbance, after all, is not a metric — it is a by-product of rigor.

What follows is a bifurcated awards structure: International Excellence and Australian Horror Excellence, allowing global achievements to be recognised without subsuming the distinct traditions and preoccupations of Australian genre cinema. Together, they form a portrait of a year in which horror did not scream — it lingered.

🔪 International Golden Scalpel Awards

🏆 Best Picture

Sinners

Sinners stands as the year’s most formally and thematically complete horror film — a work that understands terror as something inherited rather than encountered. Its horror emerges through the slow accrual of history, guilt, and unspoken violence, binding personal narrative to collective memory. Refusing easy catharsis, the film positions fear as an ethical burden passed down through generations. It is a film that cuts deep precisely because it never raises its voice.

🎬 Best Director

Ryan Coogler — Sinners

Coogler’s direction is defined by restraint and moral clarity. He resists spectacle in favour of atmosphere, performance, and spatial tension, allowing horror to surface organically rather than erupt theatrically. His control of tone and rhythm transforms Sinners into a work of sustained unease, demonstrating how genre cinema can function as historical inquiry without sacrificing emotional immediacy.

✍️ Best Screenplay

Weapons

The screenplay for Weapons is constructed around absence, fracture, and refusal. It withholds clarity not as a gimmick, but as a structural principle, forcing the audience to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it. In doing so, it redefines narrative satisfaction as something corrosive and unresolved — a mirror held up to a world where explanation itself has become suspect.

🎭 Best Actor

Michael B. Jordan — Sinners

In a dual role that resists ostentatious differentiation, Michael B. Jordan delivers a performance of remarkable discipline. Rather than signalling contrast, he allows identity to diverge through posture, rhythm, and moral orientation. The horror lies in convergence rather than opposition, as the boundaries between selves erode. Jordan’s work becomes the film’s emotional architecture, embodying Sinners’ meditation on legacy, complicity, and denial.

🎭 Best Actress

Julia Garner — Weapons

Julia Garner’s performance is calibrated to instability. She refuses psychological legibility, offering instead a portrait of a character perpetually in flux. Emotion surfaces without warning and retreats just as quickly, aligning performance with the film’s fractured narrative logic. Garner does not guide the audience — she disorients them, transforming ambiguity into a lived condition. It is a performance that demands intellectual as well as emotional engagement.

🌫 Best Atmosphere

Nosferatu

Through light, texture, and negative space, Nosferatu constructs a gothic world of immersive dread. Atmosphere here is not decorative but structural, shaping perception and emotion at every level. The film demonstrates how horror can operate through mood alone, drawing viewers into a dreamlike state where time, desire, and decay blur together.

🩻 Best Body Horror

Bring Her Back

Bring Her Back deploys body horror not as provocation but as emotional language. Physical distortion is inseparable from grief, obsession, and psychological collapse, lending the film imagery that feels tragically inevitable rather than gratuitous. The horror lingers because it feels earned.

🤖 Best Tech Horror

Companion

Grounded and unsettling, Companion explores the erosion of intimacy in a technologised world. Its horror lies not in speculative futurism, but in recognition — the quiet dread of systems already embedded in daily life. The film’s restraint allows its ideas to fester long after the final frame.

🏅 The Golden Scalpel (Highest Honour)

Sinners

Awarded to the film that most rigorously exemplifies horror as a critical discipline. Sinners cuts through history, identity, and belief with surgical precision, leaving scars rather than answers.

🇦🇺 Australian Golden Scalpel Awards

Australian Horror Excellence

Australian horror in 2025 reaffirmed its defining traits: realism, endurance, and an acute sensitivity to environment and power. These films reject excess in favour of inevitability, positioning fear as something endured rather than escaped.

🏆 Best Australian Horror Film

Dangerous Animals

A survival horror stripped of sentimentality, Dangerous Animals privileges endurance over escalation. Violence is presented as an extension of environment and instinct, aligning the film with Australia’s strongest genre traditions. Its restraint is its greatest strength.

🎬 Best Australian Director

Sean Byrne — Dangerous Animals

Byrne’s direction is marked by spatial clarity and tonal control. Threat is sustained rather than amplified, allowing dread to accumulate through inevitability. His work demonstrates a profound understanding of how environment shapes fear.

🎭 Best Australian Actor

Geoffrey Rush — The Rule of Jenny Pen

Rush delivers a performance of chilling restraint. Authority, calm, and routine become instruments of menace, revealing how cruelty often operates behind civility. It is a precise and disciplined piece of psychological horror acting.

🏞 Best Use of Australian Landscape

Dangerous Animals

Here, landscape is not backdrop but mechanism. Open space becomes isolating, indifferent, and complicit — a reminder that environment itself can be an active participant in horror.

🏅 Australian Golden Scalpel

Dangerous Animals

Awarded to the Australian film that most rigorously embodies horror as endurance, realism, and environmental threat.

Closing Cut

The Golden Scalpel Awards are not intended to settle debate, but to sharpen it. Horror remains one of cinema’s most flexible and intellectually generous modes — capable of interrogating history, technology, and identity with a clarity few genres can match. The films recognised here do not offer comfort. They offer precision.

And sometimes, that is far more unsettling.

  • Saul Muerte

Weapons (2025): Secrets Buried, Stories Unleashed

07 Thursday Aug 2025

Posted by in Movie review

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When Zach Cregger entered the horror feature scene, he didn’t tiptoe — he detonated expectations. Barbarian was less a debut than an ambush: a grimy, surprising, and brutally effective tale that revealed the monstrous rot beneath the airbrushed façade of Airbnb America. Its impact was seismic enough to place Cregger alongside names like Ari Aster and Jordan Peele — auteurs reshaping horror into the cultural mirror it was always meant to be. So when Weapons, his sophomore effort, sparked a bidding war (with Peele among the contenders), it was more than a surprise — it was a coronation in waiting.

Needless to say, Cregger won that war — and what he’s delivered is not Barbarian 2.0, but something stranger, more ambitious, and arguably more fractured. Weapons is a moody mosaic of trauma and silence, a sinister Rubik’s Cube where every rotation deepens the dread.

The premise? Devastatingly simple: seventeen children vanish in a single night from a third-grade classroom, leaving behind one silent survivor. From this incomprehensible event, the narrative spirals outward — or perhaps downward — following a grieving parent, a guilt-ridden teacher (Julia Garner in one of her finest, most haunted performances), a cop on the edge, and a child forever changed. But where other films would tighten their grip around whodunit logic, Weapons unspools into something looser, more hypnotic, and more unsettling.

Like Magnolia if directed by a sleep-deprived David Lynch with a grudge against PTA meetings, Weapons stitches together fractured timelines and parallel points of view. What emerges is not a thriller in any traditional sense, but a psychological pressure-cooker about grief, complicity, and the invisible rot hiding beneath the manicured lawns of America’s suburbs.

This underworld — literal and figurative — is fast becoming Cregger’s signature terrain. In Barbarian, it was the basement: that dread-soaked labyrinth of generational abuse buried beneath a “perfect” Detroit neighborhood. In Weapons, there is no single basement, but many — emotional caverns, buried truths, suburban crypts dressed as cul-de-sacs. The “what lies beneath” motif returns, only now it’s diffused across an entire town, each household its own cracked mask.

Cregger’s knack for dissonant tonal shifts — likely honed during his time with the absurdist comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know — is used here not just for comic relief, but as a narrative landmine. Just as you settle into one emotional register, he flips it: tragedy becomes absurdity, horror becomes farce, and laughter curdles into a scream. The comedy doesn’t soften the horror — it accentuates it, like a smile too wide on a corpse.

Though Weapons doesn’t carry the shocking immediacy of Barbarian, it proves Cregger isn’t a one-trick provocateur. He’s a filmmaker drawn to structure — and its collapse. He’s fascinated by what people repress, and what happens when that repression becomes radioactive. What makes this second feature particularly resonant is its willingness to linger, to disorient, and to drag its audience down into the darkness without the promise of catharsis.

Josh Brolin, as a grizzled, emotionally feral father, grounds the film with a gut-punch performance that crackles with grief and rage. And Garner’s turn as Justine Gandy — a character navigating guilt, authority, and maternal ambivalence — is quietly devastating. Their presence not only adds gravitas, but signals that Weapons is aiming beyond the horror niche. It wants to haunt, not just horrify.

Yes, Weapons will divide. It lacks the clean arc of a traditional mystery. It demands attention, patience, and a willingness to fall into its emotional sinkholes. But for those attuned to its wavelength, it’s a rewarding descent — a fever dream that lingers in the bones.

The Prognosis:

Cregger has once again shown that he isn’t just interested in jump scares or gore. He wants to excavate — to dig through the ruins of modern life and see what festers beneath. With Weapons, he’s pulled up something malformed, tragic, and oddly beautiful.

The question isn’t whether he’ll push boundaries in future films. It’s whether we’ll be ready for where he takes us next — or what lies buried when we get there.

  • Saul Muerte