Obsession (2026)

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Is there a more dependable path to horror filmmaking success right now than getting your start in sketch comedy? Following in the recent footsteps of sketch-turned-horror comedians Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and the Philippou Brothers, up-and-coming director Curry Barker has graduated from YouTube prankster to buzzy horror auteur du jour. The connection between those two artforms feels obvious, at least in the way that they deal in high-concept premises that need to be quickly explained and then immediately punctuated with punchlines. There’s an overt, sadistic humor in the way Barker cyclically builds & relieves tension in his debut feature Obsession that feels like a natural progression from the sketch comedy format. More importantly, these post-YouTube sketch creators speak directly to a youthful audience, playing to the prankish sensibilities of teens & twentysomethings instead of dwelling in the overly patient rhythms of recent decades’ “elevated horror”, which is quickly becoming the genre equivalent of le cinéma de papa.

I mention the youth appeal of Obsession up-front because it’s a movie tailored for people whose greatest concern in life is still their unreciprocated romantic crush, or who’s fucking whom at that their go-nowhere retail job. There’s more cowardly, unreciprocated yearning in this gross-out gore film than you’ll find in even the wimpiest teen-romance anime. Yes, you will see skulls crushed, skin carved, and house pets desecrated, but the most discomfort you’ll feel is in watching a twentysomething coward fail to muster up enough courage to confess he has a crush on his coworker. Instead, he resorts to supernatural magic, making a wish on a cursed children’s toy that she will love him “more than anyone in the whole frickin’ world.”  Of course, the wish quickly backfires, as our yearning anti-hero can’t handle the intensity of being desired instead of quietly doing the desiring himself, in private. Don’t worry, he’s also cosmically punished for the crime of using magic to coerce a peer into a nonconsensual sexual relationship, cruelly & usually.

Michael Johnston does a perfectly cromulent job playing that supernaturally tortured anti-hero, remaining a useless coward all the way to the very end. He’s frequently told by the more magic-savvy mystics in town and the One Wish Willow customer service reps that he can break the spell at any time by killing himself, but that would require action, while he is purely a creature of thought. Johnston convincingly contorts his brow with worry while considering his increasingly grim, shrinking options, never brave enough to act on any one of them. However, the real discovery here is his costar Inde Navarrette as his magically coerced crush, who’s tasked to deliver a much bigger, bolder performance. Through Navarrette, Obsession turns Quirky Movie Girlfriend behavioral tropes into a grotesque horror show, delivering cinema’s first truly scary Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. It turns out, the Quicky Movie Girlfriend archetype is still a little cute even in that context, and Navarette performs some of the best uncanny smizing seen onscreen since Anna Kendrick first became a star. She does other tricks too, like strutting backwards, discovering culinarily unconventional sources of protein, and acting as her new boyfriend’s personal sleep paralysis demon – whatever it takes to keep them close.

In its broadest terms, Obsession is a classic “careful what you wish for” Monkey’s Paw story, and Barker has admitted in a recent Fangoria interview that he initially got the idea while watching the “Monkey’s Paw” vignette from the Simpsons‘ Treehouse of Horror specials. It’s probably notable that Jordan Peele named his own production studio Monkeypaw Productions after the same short story, just as it’s notable just how much Obsession‘s house party sequence recalls the ritualist peer-pressure magic of the Philippou Brothers’ Talk to Me. Barker clearly belongs in this new class of sketch-to-horror auteurs, unafraid to prank his audience with shamelessly unfair jump scares. All that matters, really, is getting the laugh or the gasp from the audience in the moment, which Obsession did remarkably well at its local premiere opening this year’s Overlook Film Fest. Leave the worry about good taste & artistic restraint to the elevated horror fuddy-duddies of the recent past.

-Brandon Ledet

Faces of Death (2026)

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Many longtime Scream fans were horrified by what happened to their beloved slasher franchise this year, after the brand chose to self-implode rather than to employ actors vocally opposed to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Just a few months later, it turns out not to be such a big deal that Scream 7 was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show after all. The producers got what they wanted in reliable name-recognition box office returns from the politically apathetic masses, and the more discerning audiences who boycotted can now get what they want in the new Faces of Death: a reboot of a legacy horror franchise that questions the ways the genre has changed in the decades since its start. 2026’s Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least fifteen years. Notably, it does so by tracking the ways horrifically violent imagery has moved from the cineplex to our smartphones, including news footage of the aforementioned genocide.

Euphoria‘s Barbie Ferreira stars as a content moderator for a TikTok-style social media platform called Kino. She spends long, demoralizing days approving or disapproving user-flagged content on the platform, flooding her brain with the most heinous imagery & behavior her fellow humans can conceive & shoot. Much like with the original 1970s mondo movie Faces of Death, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to differentiate what violent content is simulated vs. what is authentic, pressured by her corporate higher-ups to avoid being overly censorious. The plot gets meta when she stumbles across an anonymous account that’s recreating the most gruesome scenes from Faces of Death “for real,” and she struggles to convince anyone in her life that she’s uncovered an active serial killer. When she takes this discovery to online message boards, she is subsequently abducted by that killer to star in his next viral video. Many flame-war social media posts and real-life bludgeonings ensue.

If the new Faces of Death has any overt shortcomings, it’s that it’s not nearly scary nor upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not to the desensitized eyes of a social media addict such as myself. That largely appears to be the point. Technically, this is a bloody bodycount slasher, but all of its payoffs are purely intellectual. Longtime collaborators Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) clearly took on the project as an opportunity to discuss the ways snuff-footage media akin to the original Faces of Death has become mundane thanks to the social media feeds that relentlessly overstuff our brains with real-life grotesqueries. There’s more meaning in the transition of its fictional news broadcast switching from vertical smartphone footage of a suicide to a fluff piece about a puppy shelter than there is in the cruelty of any particular kill. The movie isn’t especially scary, but it is remarkably thoughtful about the current corporate-sponsored hellscape we all willing enter every day through our phone screens.

That lack of genuine scares is no fault of its masked killer, played by Stranger Things‘s Dacre Montgomery. Covering both the ice-cold intellectualism of Hannibal Lecter and the perverse sensuality of Buffalo Bill, Montgomery’s Arthur is the total package. He’s converted his suburban McMansion into a makeshift movie studio, restaging scenes from Faces of Death because reboots are favored by the algorithm. He finds his own sense of style in the process too, murdering his victims via automaton contraptions constructed out of department store mannequins. He’s even transformed himself into a living mannequin of sorts, via skinsuits & masks, further removing himself from the violence he films for views. Everything is mediated through an artificial remove, to the point where his final showdown with Ferreira’s final girl mostly plays out on their individual laptop & phone screens even while they’re standing feet apart in the same blood-spattered room. It’s chilling to think about, even if it’s not especially scary to watch, unlike its namesake source of inspiration.

Faces of Death recently saw its local premiere at The Overlook Film Festival, where Goldhaber & crew gushed about how wonderful New Orleans is as a shooting location. Besides a brief throwaway scene set at a corporate crawfish boil on the lakefront, there isn’t much indicating that the story is set here, whereas most New Orleans movies make sure to toss in a few French Quarter scenes for local flavor. There’s probably some substantive commentary in there about the way screenlife has flattened all modern living to one locationless artificial world devoid of discernible local culture, as this is a movie entirely made of metatextual commentary about the current state of things. The Scream franchise used to think about these kinds of things too, before it devolved into cataloging the life & love soap opera milestones of Sidney Prescott, et al. Now you have to find your Slasher With Ideas kicks elsewhere, starting here.

-Brandon Ledet

The Drama (2026)

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In Kristoffer Borgli’s international breakout Sick of Myself, a woman becomes jealous of her boyfriend’s sudden art-world fame, so she fakes a disfiguring medical condition to one-up the attention he’s been getting online. In the funniest scene, she worries that her CT scan results at the hospital will expose this fraud, imagining an official medical diagnosis that she is “a liar” with “a bad personality,” which is legally punishable by death. Borgli’s first American film, Dream Scenario, follows the foibles of a schlubby college professor who becomes a living meme when he inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams across the world, a phenomenon that quickly sours once the novelty wears off and everyone’s sick of seeing his uninvited face. Borgli’s latest, The Drama, smartly continues the understated fantasy-sequence playfulness of those two previous pictures, often illustrating its characters’ intrusive thoughts as they occur in real time, then doubling back to show those characters as they actually are: unremarkable in their social anguish. Like Borgli’s previous films, The Drama also presents an absurd scenario that can easily be read as a moving think-piece on the nature of “cancel culture” but somehow never fully tips into reactionary apologia. His flippant engagement with hot-button topics in the “cancel culture” era teeter dangerously close to a kind of online edgelord conservatism but, so far, he’s always landed somewhere on the safe side of good taste. His interest appears to be on exploring the ways that our internal thoughts, however momentary, might betray our external politics, and he finds an endless wealth of humor in that tension.

The Drama starts with a young couple’s fairy-tale love story, sprinting through the full romcom meet-cute, first-date, romantic-proposal cycle in rapid montage. Borgli very quickly maps out what a crowd-pleaser romance between stars Robert Pattinson & Zendaya might look like if Hollywood was still interested in producing such a thing before he announces the stakes of his latest prank. Days before the couple’s wedding, they engage in a dinner-party game where everyone at the table confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s an uneasy but revelatory ritual that pushes through some of the awkward shame of the “getting to know you” phase in a young romance, until Zendaya’s character gets her turn. Her confession crosses an invisible social boundary that she doesn’t realize exists until it’s too late, and everyone else present is so shocked that it threatens to derail the wedding they’re supposed to be celebrating. Notably, what she confesses is technically a thought crime, an ugly impulse that she did not ultimately act on but very seriously considered. It’s also something I won’t dare to spoil in this review, since it is the bait on the film’s proverbial hook, something that is meant to be discovered and digested in real time with the bride-to-be’s immediate social circle. All I can say, really, is that this first-act reveal positions The Drama as a throwback to a kind of classic water cooler romcom, however bleak, with certified movie stars on their worst behavior. You’re supposed to ask yourself how you would react to it while you watch Robert Pattinson go through the same hypothetical turmoil, and you’re supposed to find your own sense of morality lacking in the process.

There’s plenty of ammunition here for the offended to dismiss Borgli as a shock-value provocateur, but I don’t think that’s the case. Once you get past the initial shock of its first-act confession, The Drama finds some genuinely productive provocation is asking how much modern outrage is personal, as opposed to communal. This is not a typical “How much can you truly know a person?” thought exercise. It instead asks whether modern moral outrage is driven less by the thought, “Am I okay with this?” than it is by the thought, “What would other people think of me if I were okay with this?” Very little of the central conflict is mediated through phone & computer screens like in Borgli’s previous pictures, but it still feels like it’s depicting a moral crisis specific to a post-social media world. Pattinson’s protagonist is not allowed time to internally process what he’s learned about his fiancée’s past; he’s pressured to immediately take a moral stance on it as a kind of performative social spectacle, causing great anxiety as he attempts to keep his shit together for the ultimate social spectacle: an expensive wedding. The pressure of publicly responding to this moral crisis makes for great comedic tension as the wedding deadline approaches, and it inspires anxious daydreams & nightmares that recall the low-level surrealism of Borgli’s previous works. It’s neither his meanest nor his most expressive film to date, but it does manage to throttle its audience with various social & moral crises while most of its imagery ultimately amounts to People Talking in Rooms — an increasingly rare feat at the American cineplex.

-Brandon Ledet

Project Hail Mary (2026)

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I thought I was too cynical to be charmed by the sci-fi adventure film Project Hail Mary, and with good reason. Just this week, I was looking at news reports about the progress of the real-life space adventures of Artemis II, which in its first few days produced photographic documentation of the dark side of the Moon while traveling further from Earth than any astronauts have previously gone, and my first thought was “Wow, what a waste of resources.” Why are we spending so much money on space travel and moon colonization research when those same funds could be used to immediately house, feed, and medicate people who are struggling on the planet we already inhabit? Basically, I had a full Gil Scott-Heron moment, too knee-jerk cynical to appreciate the wonders of “Whitey” orbiting the Moon. So, how could I hope to be charmed by the outer space adventurism of Project Hail Mary, which spends its entire 156min runtime forcibly cramming that same sense of wonder into its audience’s skulls? Well, it’s helpful that it’s a work fiction, one that can create immediate, dire stakes that make an exploratory mission into outer space immediately necessary to save human lives back on Earth. Even more helpfully, its heaping helping of Hollywood schmaltz is delivered via one of the most charming actors of our time, so that it doesn’t matter how cynical you are about the exorbitant expense of space travel; it just matters whether you personally find Ryan Gosling funny.

Gosling stars as an unassuming middle school science teacher who wakes up dazed & alone on a long-distance space mission, unsure how he became an astronaut. In a dual timeline structure, we learn the history of how he got there and the future of what he can achieve, both related to a mysterious substance that is threatening the continuation of life on Earth by dimming the Sun. In both timelines, he teams up with a hard-to-read scientific genius that he must learn how to communicate with in order to functionally collaborate: an Earthbound human played by Sandra Hüller and a fellow space-traveling alien creature played by a puppet, shaped like a collection of rocks. In both timelines, the plot is entirely constructed of problem-solving scientific experiments, breaking down the grand mission of returning home safely after saving the Sun into a series of simpler, less daunting puzzles. The scientific specifics of these sequential experiments seemingly don’t mean much to directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller, who find more inspiration in the source novel’s broader themes of the bravery that ordinary people can find in the grimmest of times, as long as they have a reason to hope & dream. If that sounds a little hokey, it’s because it is, and composer Daniel Pemberton frequently scores the film like he’s working on an allergy medicine commercial about a stuffed-up suburban mom who can finally enjoy life because she can breathe again. However, just because it’s hokey doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, which is something I should probably keep in mind the next time the world goes gaga over a rocket launch.

The space-exploration adventurism of Project Hail Mary is ultimately secondary to its person-to-person social interactions, charting Gosling’s transformation from an isolated misanthrope to humanity’s bravest soldier. He starts the film wary of people as an abstract idea, but he’s continually won over by his fellow scientists on a one-on-one basis, and it’s consistently charming to watch him warm up to the concept. He’s an overly chatty fella for someone who doesn’t like attention, and the movie essentially asks him to put on a one-man show against screen partners figuratively or literally made of stone. Gosling makes warmth & humor look effortless, getting so cozy in his oversized sweaters that his eyeglasses eventually hang entirely off his face as he pleads his case. Meanwhile, Sandra Hüller is expertly humorless, playing icy straight man to his charming schlub shenanigans. It’s a shame that the narrative’s dual timeline structure limits how much of their onscreen chemistry we get to see here; they’d kill in an Old Hollywood screwball throwback where their warm-and-icy dynamic clashed at feature length. Thankfully, though, Gosling also has a great rapport with the rock puppet, conveying a genuine enough sense of friendship that I was occasionally moved to tears by their mutual kindness (despite the fact that there’s technically only one actor onscreen during their scenes). In short, Ryan Gosling can charm anyone, no matter how tightly our arms are crossed at the start.

I should be clear that I don’t actually believe that exploratory space missions like Artemis II are a waste of public resources (at least not compared to even more egregious wastes on police & military weaponry). There are plenty of online articles around explaining how past space missions have led to scientific developments like solar power, water purification, prosthetic limbs, heart pumps, and various other technologies that benefit humans back on Earth. Even in Project Hail Mary‘s all-important mission to save our dying Sun, Gosling’s ship is equipped with smaller experiments in the background studying plant growth and other mundane processes. My initial animal-brain response to these far-reaching space missions just happens to be a cynical one, and then I have to be reminded why they matter in the bigger picture. Project Hail Mary‘s success is in the way it translates that bigger-picture space research through more intimate, humanist concerns. Ryan Gosling’s unremarkable schoolteacher protagonist is on a mission to save all of humanity, but all of the emotional beats in that story are narrowed down to how he interacts with the person immediately in front of him, whether they’re from Germany or from an alien planet. It’s practically a workplace comedy in that way, a sitcom where Gosling’s job is doing science and his favorite coworker is a talking pile of rocks.

-Brandon Ledet

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, despite the seven years that have passed since the first Ready or Not was released, picks up right where it left off. Grace Le Domas née MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has just survived until dawn while being hunted by her new husband’s family on her wedding night. As the paramedics and EMS arrive, she’s asked what happened, to which she just replies “in-laws.” While this was the punchline capper on the end of that film, here, an offscreen voice asks her what this means, moments before she faints from exhaustion and is taken to the hospital, complete with an ambulance ride that allows for her to have flashbacks to the first film each time she is defibrillated. When she awakens, she’s greeted by the local sheriff, who has handcuffed her to the bed so that he can explain clearly and plainly that she’s in a lot of trouble. Her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), arrives; despite their estrangement, Grace never bothered to remove Faith as her emergency contact. Grace also gets to recap the first film for the benefit of both her sister and the audience, which was, frankly, needed after such a long time between films. We witness some very basic signs of past conflict between them that the film will later belabor but, luckily, we move past that fairly quickly upon the arrival of Mr. Le Bail (aka Satan)’s lawyer (Elijah Wood). 

From here, we get introduced to the overall plot of this sequel. Grace’s survival of the Le Domas’ game of hide and seek means that the current “high seat” of the council of families who rule the world is up for grabs. Grace, along with Faith, will now be hunted across the grounds of a resort owned by the Danforths, twins named Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are fighting to keep the Danforth family in the high chair. Also gathered for the occasion are Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell) as well as his two children, the elder of whom was engaged to Grace’s late husband before he abandoned her for Grace. Ready, set, go. 

It’s not uncommon for horror sequels to follow the past of least resistance when crafting a follow up to a film that was never intended to be more than a one-and-done. Ready or Not 2, for as enjoyable as it was, seems to have chosen the easiest option for all of its story beats. The basic premise—girl must survive the night while being hunted by rich assholes—is essentially the same, and the expansive resort on which the most dangerous game is being pursued is little more than the Le Domas mansion and its grounds magnified. Other than the presence of an industrial washing machine and a wedding-decorated ballroom that allows for a bride-on-bride brawl, it’s functionally identical to the previous film’s locale. When there’s nothing fresh in the setting or the logline, the only places where you can shake things up a little are in the characters and the mythology, and Here I Come takes a stab at each of these, with mixed results. 

Character-wise, there’s nothing that Kathryn Newton’s Faith contributes to the narrative here. If you remove her from the film completely, you would have to come up with a different motivation for a couple of Grace’s choices, but nothing that would fundamentally change the narrative or the climax. Weaving carried Ready or Not with her performance, and I don’t buy that the sequel needed her to have a scene partner in order to make it work. It’s not that Newton’s a bad performer, but she’s completely superfluous here. Further, there’s a sense that this film wanted to, for lack of a better term, “go international,” but instead of taking that opportunity to shoot Here I Come in a substantially visually different location, it’s mostly just an excuse to gather a cast of actors of color to act as cannon fodder for the hunt before the finale focuses solely on the MacCaullays versus the Danforths. You’re not going to catch me complaining about getting to see Gellar for so much of this film (she looks great, by the way), but it is to its detriment that so many of its non-white characters read as caricatures who die hilariously while the white villains get more nuance and screen time. Other than Ursula and the lawyer, none of these new characters are particularly memorable. 

That leaves the lore and the mythology to do most of the heavy lifting in the novelty department, and boy, there sure is a lot of it. Remember how the rules of the world of assassins in the John Wick films just kept getting bigger and more consequential, to the point where it was bogging down what we were all here for? Here I Come does much the same. Woods is very charming as Le Bail’s advocate, and the elaborate bylaws of the various Satanic covenants and their attendant loopholes do push us through to a visually dynamic conclusion that sees Grace get to don a cool, new, evil wedding dress. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the elaboration of Le Bail’s big scary book of infernal torts and nefarious estate dispersal regulations makes for exciting viewing, however. No one ever even seems to consider suggesting an alternative to Grace marrying Titus to save her and her sister’s life, namely, why don’t Grace and Ursula just get married? Does Mr. Le Bail not recognize marriage equality? This is the devil we’re talking about; are we supposed to believe that he has the same views on marriage that Kim Davis does? (Wait, actually, strike that; it actually does hold water that they would both be evil.) We do get to see a series of load-bearing evil statutes collapse in a series of dominos, but it starts to feel a bit like edutainment aimed at assisting the viewer in studying for the bar exam in hell. 

All of those negatives having been said, this is still a fair bit of fun. It’s going to suffer in comparison to its spiritual sibling They Will Kill You, and that’s going to be warranted; that film does the whole “one woman fights evil cultists to save her sister” plot with more style and flair, even if the sister subplot in both is mere window dressing. But while that was primarily a film focused on its visual dynamism and elaborate fight choreography, this one is more interested in playing the hits from its predecessor, with an additional layer of familial conflict that gets run into the ground long before the film resolves it. In the meantime, though, the gore is still delightful and fun, and the script is peppered with some pretty good jokes. The best fight sequence finds Grace fighting Ignacio’s daughter in their dual wedding dresses, ineffectually flailing at one another after both are doused with pepper spray. Ignacio and his daughter’s incompetence with their weapons in comparison to his hypercompetent young son is a good bit, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. An early use of the aforementioned industrial washer leads to one gruesome early kill of the MacCaullay women’s assailants, even if very few that follow are as inventive or funny. Weaving also continues to shine here, as she does in everything she appears in. If you’re going to choose only one movie about rich Satanists getting taken out by a girl from an abusive home who’s only involved in the events of the film because of a threat to her sister in theaters this month, They Will Kill You is the better choice, but if you’re going to do a double feature, these will pair well with one another . . . if you watch Here I Come first.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

They Will Kill You (2026)

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I had mixed feelings upon first seeing the trailer for They Will Kill You, the first English feature from Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who previously directed two Russian language films that, based on their trailers, appear to have a similar tone and style as this one. At first, I was very excited for the film, since it looked like a lot of fun, but I was also annoyed that its advertising felt like it gave away too much of the movie’s plot. Although that’s true to a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised that there were still many more twists and turns to come in the feature itself than the promotional materials let on. 

Ten years after nonfatally shooting their abusive father and failing to rescue her younger sister from his clutches, a woman calling herself Isabella (Zazie Beetz) appears at The Virgil, an extremely upscale Manhattan hotel, introducing herself as the new maid. After she’s given a brief tour of the maids’ floor by head of housekeeping Lily (Patricia Arquette), she’s ushered into her room, where she immediately barricades the door. In the night, several cloaked figures (including Heather Graham and Tom Felton) manage to enter her room a different way and attempt to kill her, alternately calling her a “sacrifice” and an “offering.” They quickly realize, however, that their latest lamb to be led to the slaughter is more than she appears, and that she’s not trapped in The Virgil with them; they’re trapped inside with her. 

“Isabella,” who reveals her name is Asia, has a motivation that’s pretty straightforward. After being paroled from prison, where she was incarcerated for the attempted murder of her father, she went to the place where her younger sister was last seen, in the hopes of saving her from whatever shenanigans were happening in the place. Some of the set up is a little flimsy, but it’s all just window dressing to get to the film’s purpose: showing Zazie Beetz going utterly feral against hordes of cultists with axes, machetes, shotguns, and any and every weapon she can get her hands on. It’s a gory splatterfest of decapitations, crushed eyeballs, impaled hands, exploding heads, screwdriver stabbings, and flaming hatchets, and it’s an objective success in the glorious violence department. 

The action choreography is extremely competent. After more than two decades of Bourne Identity-inspired shake cams and excessive editing, it’s refreshing to see that the dedication to craft that John Wick reminded everyone was possible continues to inspire successive action filmmakers. It’s that franchise that this film seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, especially with regards to the lead character’s virtually god-mode fighting prowess and the setting of a specialized hotel that comes preloaded with mythology, lore, and rules of engagement. Its other major inspiration seems to be the filmography of disgraced director Quentin Tarantino, most especially Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; its order isn’t necessarily anachronic in the same way that those films are, but the chronology of the story often stops for a scene or two to reveal some past event that informs the current scene, and there are certain moments where Asia’s movements and poses seem to be styled directly on Uma Thurman’s The Bride. 

Visually, the film has a lot of style. Although the film foregoes the Bourne Identity style, that doesn’t mean that the audience is watching these excellent action sequences play out statically. The camera is constantly moving, following characters around hotel corners and through crawlspaces and ducts on a moving track. There’s one really excellent oner that follows Asia and Lily facing off in a hallway that moves toward Lily, gives Arquette a moment to deliver one of her trademark bits of visceral vitriol, and then tracks back to the other end of the hallway to complete an orbital shot around battle-poised Asia before continuing back into the room she just exited. It’s really good stuff. The film also makes excellent use of empty/black space, as the film will sometimes “zoom out” to show only a hallway or a vertical tunnel so that we can track where every party is in The Virgil’s labyrinthine structure, and it looks fantastic. 

I don’t want to reveal too much about the multiple directions that this one takes narratively. I thought that the trailer gave away too much, but unlike recent spoiled-by-the-trailer films that come to mind like Abigail and Speak No Evil, this one makes you think you know too much about it, before pulling the rug from under you. It’s not that this is a plot that you’ve never seen before; you almost certainly have, but it’s worth remembering that the reason you’re here is to see Zazie Beetz bludgeon some Satanists into pulp, not to get caught up on loopholes and infernal contract law. That having been said, there are some things that it’s really worth keeping a secret until one can see the film themselves. This one probably won’t be in theaters too much longer, based on its current box office performance, but it’s worth seeing with others in a group setting to get the maximum fun factor out of it. Then again, I don’t blame you if you’d rather wait til it hits streaming so you don’t have to see the same jokes from The Devil Wears Prada 2 twice in both the film’s trailer and the “silence your phones” ad before the feature starts. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Fury (1936)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Fritz Lang’s mob-justice noir Fury (1936).

00:00 Welcome
01:34 Nadja (1994)
05:07 Queen Margot (1994)
07:47 Number Seventeen (1932)
12:32 Miroirs No. 3 (2026)
15:57 Ernst Lubitsch
24:33 Fat Girl (2001)
30:34 Mad Love (1935)
36:11 Ruthie the Duck Girl (1999)
43:53 The Wolf House (2018)
47:49 A Body to Live In (2026)
53:22 Undertone (2026)
1:03:07 The Chronology of Water (2026)
1:07:17 Alpha (2026)
1:17:27 OBEX (2026)
1:22:37 The Bride! (2026)
1:26:42 They Will Kill You (2026)
1:30:55 The Drama (2026)
1:36:26 Forbidden Fruits (2026)

1:44:42 Fury (1936)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Chronologies of Trauma

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Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.

If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.

I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.

You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Queen Margot (1994)

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Do Americans care about the César Awards? The annual film awards ceremony is colloquially known as “The French Oscars,” but it doesn’t get nearly as much Oscars-precursor press coverage as, say, “The British Oscars” (The BAFTAs), which Americans already only barely pretend to care about. I presume a large part of that cross-cultural indifference has to do with the fact that France already has a super prestigious awards ceremony at Cannes, which tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen in that industry. Last year, for instance, Jafar Panahi’s political revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to earn great international acclaim, while The Ties that Bind Us won Best Film at The César Awards and has been heard of by no one outside the borders of France. The year before, Emilia Pérez swept the César Awards before becoming an openly mocked punchline at The Oscars, and no one knew to make fun of their French colleagues for it because no one pays attention to the Césars. I say all this to note that I have no idea how big of a deal it is that the 1994 historical drama Queen Margot won five César Awards in its qualifying year (for cinematography, costume design, and nearly every acting category), since its single, subsequent nomination for Best Costume Design at the Oscars has at best left it as a pop culture footnote. No American is picking up a used DVD copy of Queen Margot at the thrift store because it was a major player at The French Oscars; we’re picking it up because it advertises a blood-soaked Isabelle Adjani on the cover, and she has an impeccable track record of being great in movies where her character is having a bad day.

If I closed my eyes and imagined what a stereotypical film that cleans up at an event called “The French Oscars” would look like, I would picture something a lot like Queen Margot. The lavish historical drama details the big-picture atrocities and petty personal betrayals of the French royal court during the 16th Century crusades, in which the Catholics in control of the nation were eager to “convert” (i.e, kill) all Protestants by sword or die trying. It’s a staggeringly extravagant production in its scale, its costuming and, because it’s French, its sex & violence. Star Isabelle Adjani’s glamour-shot lighting is extravagant as well, with more attention paid to her stoic beauty than to her trademark talent for simulating a total mental breakdown, as featured in earlier titles like Possession, The Story of Adele H, and Camile Claudel. Of course, Adjani continues to suffer here—as that is her specialty—but she does so quietly instead of thrashing her body against the proverbial tunnel wall. She starts the movie being forced into a sham royal wedding that is either meant to end the Catholic-Protestant conflict through cross-faith marriage or meant to bait her scheming family’s enemies to a single location for convenient slaughter, depending on who you ask. Regardless, the opening wedding celebrations quickly devolve into a Paris-wide bloodbath and Adjani’s queen-to-be has to spend the rest of the movie negotiating the continued survival of both her brothers and her lovers as the conflict plays out. She has very little success in that regard and often finds herself mourning one loved one after another, but she looks great doing so, never missing the spotlight for her closeups.

By American & British costume drama standards, Queen Margot is shocking in its scale and its extremity. Whether it’s staging a celebratory post-wedding orgy or a horrific battlefield massacre, there are bodies everywhere. Every wide shot is packed with extras in exquisitely detailed costumes, often for them to be removed or destroyed depending on the mood of the moment. Every candlelit interior is warmly intimate and carefully arranged – every frame a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the sex & bloodshed are deliberately ugly & messy. Slit throats spew geysers of blood, like a visual gag from Kill Bill Vol. 1. Whenever sexually frustrated, the titular royal LARPs as a streetwalker, enjoying anonymous alley sex with peasants as if a simple half-mask could obscure a face as striking as Adjani’s. People fuck; they kill; they hunt wild boars for sport and then fuck & kill during the excitement. It’s like an overlong, over-serious episode of The Great in that way, to the point where I’d be shocked to learn that this wasn’t a formative work for screenwriter Tony MacNamara. The very best sequences find a way to combine the sex & violence into a single lethal concoction, created in a mad-scientist lab by Margot’s mother’s perfumer, who also dabbles in poisons. He creates a poisoned glove, a poisoned book, and a poisoned batch of makeup that offer a much softer, more sensual murder method than the sword-wielding brutes outside the Louvre. Of course, those poisons can be gnarly too, causing their victims to bleed to death out of every pore in prolonged agony. The movie never misses its chance to show the audience some more blood.

Queen Margot opens with a long scroll of expository text that orients the audience in its historical setting, followed by forty or so minutes of character introductions before its melodrama starts in earnest. That relatively dry intro and the film’s lingering reputation as an awards-season period piece will lead you to expect something much statelier & more subdued than what’s ultimately delivered. Once the stage is set, though, it wastes no time indulging in the grotesque sex & violence of its 16th Century royal court, where it’s totally natural to hear lovers plead, “I want to see the image of my death in my pleasure” while fucking and combatants declare, “For each one you kill a sin will be forgiven!” while fighting. It’s a real actor’s showcase in that way, with plenty space in its near-three-hour runtime for every performer in the main cast to get in their own awards show clips. Notably, Adjani did win Best Actress at the 20th César Awards for her performance as the titular lead, but at Cannes that honor went to her co-star Virna Lisi, who plays her scheming mother (Catherine, the court’s #1 poison enthusiast). Adjani already had earned two Best Actress wins at past Cannes for Possession & Quartet, but it’s still a surprising footnote among the film’s official accolades, continuing the two women’s mutually destructive onscreen power struggle to the press circuit. They did both go on to win separate acting awards at The French Oscars, but I’m still not totally sure of those statues’ worth. Hell, the American Oscars awarded two statues to the aforementioned Emilia Pérez a couple years ago, so even the ceremonies we do pay attention to are effectively a joke.

-Brandon Ledet

Nadja (1994)

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In 1987, Fisher Price introduced the PXL2000, a toy black and white camera that used audio cassettes to capture video images. It didn’t go over well initially, but 90s indie filmmakers apparently liked to futz about with them. After directing Twister—not the one that you’re thinking of, a movie released by Vestron and which I have seen the trailer for across dozens of their VHS tapes without ever stumbling across a cassette of the film itself—director Michael Almereyda made a fifty-six-minute feature using the PXL2000 in its entirety. For his third feature, Nadja, Almereyda decided to use the toy camera only intermittently. Theoretically, it was only for the shots that were supposed to represent the point of view of the title character, but in practice, I don’t think that’s the case. 

Nadja is, naturally, the story of Nadja (Elina Löwensohn), Dracula’s daughter via a serf somewhere “in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains.” When her father dies, having been killed at long last by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda, with grey hair almost down to his waist), she, alongside her attendant, Renfield (Karl Geary), claims his body and ensures that he will not rise again. Van Helsing, inexplicably released from prison despite being caught in the act of murdering someone, impresses upon his disbelieving nephew Jim (longtime Hal Hartley collaborator Martin Donovan) that Dracula’s daughter may still be at large in their unnamed American city; meanwhile, Nadja is in the process of seducing Jim’s wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) into joining her in the darkness. Nadja’s other primary goal is to reunite with her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who has seemingly allowed himself to slip into virtual catatonia as a result of refusing to feed on humans, leaving him bedridden and attended to by his beloved Cassandra (Suzy Amis), who also happens to be Van Helsing’s daughter. 

Those parts of the film that are shot on film are gorgeous, and sumptuous. The periodic intrusion of “footage” from the PXL2000 is incredibly off-putting, even as a stylistic choice. It doesn’t hold weight conceptually, either, as it at first appears that it is supposed to be in use to indicate when a character is being affected by Nadja’s psychic powers, but it also seems to be used randomly at other points. In essence, the effect it creates is one that presages what it’s like to watch a high quality video online only for it to randomly buffer from 1080p to 120p for the duration of a scene, then cut back to crystal clarity. My neck was actually stiff from the contortions I made sitting in the arthouse theatre trying to clearly understand what was happening when Almereyda suddenly switched recording devices. It looked almost as bad as the version of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent that’s currently available on Hoopla, which is really saying something. When it would cut back to the actual film, it was a wave of relief, and I can only imagine that may have been the intention, but it did not make for a pleasant viewing experience. 

Narratively, there’s not much to the film. Fonda’s Van Helsing is bizarrely fascinating as he wanders into scenes full of energy that his younger co-stars don’t really seem to match, either because this was too far outside of Donovan’s wheelhouse or because Craze’s character was simply in the midst of one of her many dull sequences of being a mindless thrall. For most of the film, characters simply stand around and deliver exposition to one another, and while it’s nice that the screen is full of pretty people (and Jared Harris) when that’s happening, there’s very little plot to speak of. I’d have been much more entertained if the film had been more full of deadpan humor, but the really fun bits of dialogue are few and far between. After a brief cameo from David Lynch as the morgue attendant who falls under Nadja’s spell, the laughs are hard to come by, and one can never be sure just how much of the film one is laughing with instead of at. This was a packed screening, and I still often found myself the only one chuckling during scenes which I was certain were being played for humor. Surely, the idea of calling the communication between Edgar and Nadja a “psychic fax” was a joke, right? This also sets up the biggest laugh of the film for me, when Edgar puts his fingertips to his temple and says “I’m getting a psychic fax… [Nadja’s] on a plane… she’s dying. For a cigarette.” This did manage to get a guffaw from most of the audience, but I’m not sure that we were all aware just what we were in for. I can see this one developing a cult audience in the 90s, especially when it has a soundtrack that features both The Verve and Portishead, but it’s also a puzzling little oddity that I’m not sure I’ll remember much about in the months to come.  

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond