Backrooms (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is The Monster horror; the other two are YouTube pranks for the children.” At long last, Backrooms feels like an appropriate synthesis of the two; it clearly takes inspiration from the recent horror trend of using monsters as metaphors but isn’t completely preoccupied with that conceit, while its use of jumpscares, muffled voices from distant rooms, and eerie imagery taken straight from internet creepypasta means it has an appeal for viewers of a younger generation. 

It’s June of 1990, and failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living in his struggling furniture store after being kicked out of his house by his wife following a nasty, drunken argument. He’s seeing Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, about his drinking problems and his belief that he’s “wired” to be confrontational and unpleasant. In one session, they role play the night of the marriage-threatening argument, which reveals that Clark is resentful of having to manage Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire while his wife fumbles her way through law school. When an electrician is unable to find the source of issues that are causing the store’s bills to skyrocket, he and Clark discover a couple of extra switches haphazardly added to the store’s breaker box. Investigating the box again late one night, he finds an invisible portal through the wall of the store’s basement into a seemingly infinite series of fluorescent-lit, white-walled, beige-carpeted rooms. When he tries to tell Mary about this discovery, he can tell that she doesn’t believe him, so he sets out to get proof, enlisting store employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has access to recording equipment via his college. They enter the titular backrooms to document their discovery, only to find that they’re not alone down there. 

While having coffee with a friend recently, the topic of the upcoming X-Files reboot came up. We each agreed that it’s hard to imagine a functional version of that franchise in a post-9/11 world, specifically that the concept of mostly-for-fun conspiracy theories is difficult to play with in a world where fringe lunatics run our government. There already is a functional post-9/11 X-Files, and it’s called Fringe, and we briefly discussed what that meant on a level beyond the textual. Specifically, the strange and paranormal encounters that the various innocents on The X-Files always occur in remote areas: deep in the woods, out in the desert, or in vast fields of crops that seem to have no end. On Fringe, the horrible things that happen to people mostly occur in urban environments: diners, downtown Boston, and, fairly often, on airplanes. The safety of a metropolis is not a given after 9/11, and Fringe took that to a logical end. I thought about that a lot during Backrooms, specifically in how it managed to feel as fresh and new to me as The Blair Witch Project must have seemed in 1999, and that with time and distance, we no longer need to send Heather and her crew out to the woods to find something spooky. The backrooms are already here, in urban environments that contain them and camouflage them to the naked eye. You can make sure you never encounter the Blair Witch by making sure that you avoid her forest; but you might wander into the backrooms completely unaware, which is more immediate and spookier. 

I’m not really that into the current state of creepypasta. Jenny Nicholson made a Patreon video last year in which she effectively delineated something that had occurred to me conceptually but hadn’t put into words: things are usually creepier the less defined they are, and because creepypasta and SCP appeal to a very specific kind of online nerd, what used to be a story about some evil, inexplicable stairs in a state park or a basketball that caused psychic nosebleeds started to get more and more lore, to the point that the premise of the object or place becomes more important than the mystery. The concept of liminal spaces has become a matter of no small niche internet interest in recent years, as the prevalence of computer imagery rendering software has given rise to the ability to easily make creepy, Escherian office spaces for internet consumption. (I also think that there’s an argument to be made that omnipresent GPS mapping has made people generally less able to orient themselves without outside assistance, which makes labyrinthine spaces more frightening to people who have poor directional sense.)That influence has already leaked into the film world at large, as it inspired the creator of the game on which Exit 8 was based, and that’s what director Kane Parsons has been up to online. The film’s opening sequence appears to have been made entirely in Blender, and even though that means that some of the seams show through (there’s an audiocassette on a desk that’s as thin as a 3.5 inch floppy disk), it’s still effective. 

For a film set in the nineties, the fact that this was made by a director who’s only just barely able to legally drink means that it eschews a lot of the nostalgia factor that one would expect to be a huge part of a film set decades earlier. Artifacts of the time period are limited to the use of a camcorder for the documentation of the backrooms themselves, inexpensively produced local commercials, and self-help audiocassettes, and the only direct nostalgia bait is that we find a mysterious researcher at home with his family watching The Neverending Story on TV (the finale also features audio lifted directly from Star Trek IV, but I don’t think that will be noticed by many). The VHS camcorder quality of the found footage style segments of the film is extremely well done and effective at creating a feeling of the nineties without needing to rely on cheap “I remember that!” moments. After several years of nostalgia-poisoned period pieces like Stranger Things, this is a welcome relief. 

The performances here are very strong as well. One would think that a young director would take an easier route and focus his storytelling on characters closer to his own age, but either he or screenwriter Will Soodik made the wise choice to instead focus the film on characters of a more mature age. Ejiofor and Reinsve are two extremely competent performers, with multiple Oscar and BAFTA nominations between them, and there are several powerful scenes between the two of them that have no bearing on the eldritch location in Clark’s store at all. Reinsve’s Mary is haunted by a childhood raised by a mother who slowly lost her battle with schizophrenia, and Ejiofor’s Clark is a man whose psychology leads him to deflect all blame for his life and circumstances onto others. The latter of these two is a little weaker than the other; we only get Clark’s side of the story, but if he gave up his career for something more stable in order to support his wife through an extended education, and she really did quit for no real reason and still isn’t working, his resentment isn’t entirely unfounded. Still, whether one feels that Clark is an awful man before the backrooms start to exert their influence over him or if it’s only their evil that pushes him to a point where we can no longer sympathize, Ejiofor manages to play it well. Still, neither of these past griefs is so predominant in the film’s narrative that this feels like a retread of similar elevated horrors of recent years. The backrooms recreate things that it “remembers,” with each recreation becoming less and less like the thing that it’s supposed to represent, and in that way it’s like the imperfection of memory, but this works perfectly well as a variation on a haunted house as conceived in a digital age without needing to use “the apparition is a metaphor” as a crutch. 

This is probably the best straightforward horror that I’ve seen so far this year. It’s creepy, effective, disorienting, well-directed, and nicely acted. Finally!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekin (2018)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and gore-heavy shockers before, so I don’t understand how anyone can figure this is the best movie of the year. To me, the extremely high Letterboxd reviews tell a story not about the film’s overall quality but about the filmmaker’s popularity with an online generation. 

Perhaps the greatest signifier that I may simply be losing my grip on what makes a movie good or bad is what a great time I had with $0 budget indie Ramekin, a 70-minute single location horror thriller with a main cast of three unknown actors that’s currently floating around on Tubi. College student Emily (Jamie Saunders) is living in an awful sublet situation when she gets a call from her mother letting her know that her reclusive grandmother on the other side of NYC has died. Emily takes up residence in her late grandmother’s home and becomes immediately fascinated with a very normal looking ramekin, which then starts to appear in random parts of the apartment. Emily comes to realize there’s something supernatural going on when she is physically unable to throw the thing out of a window, and when it prevents her from leaving. The two manage to communicate somewhat via Emily’s questions and the ramekin’s slight movements, which eventually leads to an altercation over the ramekin’s insistence on watching the shy, self-conscious Emily shower. As an apology, the ramekin begins to offer her gifts in the form of cupcakes and cash which it manifests within itself, and plays music for her, all of which allow the ramekin to slowly infiltrate her mind. 

Under the ramekin’s influence, Emily devotes all of her time to composing poetry, most of it containing violent imagery about blood and death. In fugue states, she holds a knife to her own throat and destroys upholstery. She also becomes utterly narcissistic, continuously praising her beauty, her body, and her creative work. This leads to a schism between her and her best friend, a lovely but dim-witted girl named Jane (Renee Adrienne Vito) who speaks with a Valley Girl’s vernacular. At the same time, Emily befriends Mark (Adriano La Rocca), the neighbor who had previously brought Emily’s grandmother her mail and took out her trash for her, who somehow overlooks all of Emily’s strange behaviors because of his interest in her. When Emily finally goes too far, Mark breaks off contact, but is lured back inside for a final visit, during which Emily kills him, pouring his blood into the ramekin, which seems to drink it. Things only get stranger from there. 

Ramekin is an odd duck. If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is what makes it so strange. Even at seventy minutes, it threatens to get repetitive at times, especially in the sequence in which Emily continuously moves the ramekin to the dish drying rack only for it to reappear on the kitchen table; despite this, I never grew bored with it. I can only assume that the ramekin itself was moved around with magnets, and all of its other special abilities, like manifesting money and sweets, occur between cuts. I can see this easily being a film that other people will find boring or dull, but the performances by its nonprofessional actors are utterly compelling. I love that the actor portraying Mark has bad skin, and that I can’t tell if Jane’s overreliance on “like” as a placeholder word is a scripting choice or just something that came from the performer. Jamie Saunders is tasked with carrying this entire narrative with only an Ikea dish as her scene partner, and she manages to do it with aplomb. The jokes here land, and although one is never truly frightened by the ramekin, it’s still effectively creepy when it needs to be. My only real problem with the film overall is that it ends with an “all just a dream” fakeout, which I think was unnecessary. Just let it end on the bummer ending! I feel completely alone in my apathetic-to-negative reaction to Obsession, but if you’re like me, you may find more to love in this genuinely original oddball cheapie about obsessive behavior.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s family last weekend and, since our choices were either Obsession, Passenger, or The Sheep Detectives, we packed into two cars and drove to the AMC in Deerfield, Illinois (birthplace of Kitty Pryde!) to watch Hugh Jackman get murdered, in a PG way. 

George Hardy (Jackman) is a vegetarian shepherd who is adored by his flock and either ignored or disliked by most of the human residents of the village of Denbrook. He has a deep and abiding dislike for both butcher Ham Gilyard (who, for his part, says he can tolerate vegetarianism in women but finds it distasteful in men) and a fellow shepherd named Caleb (Tosin Cole) who leases meadowland from George. There’s also some amount of friction between him and local innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau) and Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), although the nature of their beef is part of the mystery. His flock, however, adores him as their caregiver. Notable members of the herd include a mysterious recent addition named Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) with a dark and troubled past, the elderly and stentorious contagious ecthyma sufferer Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), the beautiful diva Cloud (Regina Hall), and oddball Mopple (Chris O’Dowd). George’s pride and joy, however, is Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), who is named for George’s late wife and who is, by the other sheep’s reckoning, the smartest sheep in the world. After all, she’s the only one who always figures out who the killer is in the mystery novels that George reads to the flock nightly. 

Shortly after the arrival of Elliott Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), an obituary reporter who has come to Denbrook to cover their “heritage festival” only to discover it consists of three folding tables behind the inn, George is murdered. Local constable Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) is a clumsy oaf who has little hope of solving the killing and enlists Elliott to assist him. Further complicating matters is the arrival of George’s fancy lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who reveals that George’s home-brewed remedy for contagious ecthyma has been sold to a major farm pharmaceutical company, and that she has brought George’s long-lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon) to Denbrook for the reading of the will. 

When I texted Brandon about the film, he mentioned that he had seen it reviewed elsewhere as “Knives Out meets Babe,” and I’ve seen it referred to that way in other places as well. That’s fairly accurate, but what’s most striking about the film is the way that it handles the internal lives of the sheep who make up most of its cast. They have a cosmological theology, namely that they believe sheep eventually turn into clouds at the end of their lives, the same clouds which rain down and nourish the grass of future generations. They also have the ability to willfully forget any information which bothers them or gives them anxiety, which means that even though Lily herself witnessed the death of her parents, she has Men in Blacked herself into hanging onto her beliefs. Only Mopple, who is treated as somewhat disabled by the other sheep for his inability to intentionally forget, understands the reality of the world, and has to bear this alone. This also means that the sheep have no real concept of “death,” thinking of murder as a literary device only, not something that could happen to their beloved shepherd. And, instinctively, they reject a lamb born in the winter rather than the spring (a behavior of real sheep) for being “wrong” in ways that they never articulate and probably couldn’t if they tried. 

It’s all fascinating stuff, but given that this is a family feature, it’s only explored insofar as it relates to the main mystery. Although there were a couple of scenes that were frightening for our nine-year-old viewing companion (most notably a fight between some frightening guard dogs and Sebastian), this is a movie where the biggest clue to the murderer’s identity requires no more sophisticated knowledge than blue + yellow = green. It’s the kind of film that you see and think to yourself that now you know what you should watch with your parents the next time you can’t agree on something during the holidays. I’m a huge fan of cozy mysteries, but the actual mystery here is on par with a slightly below average episode of Murder, She Wrote, succeeding mostly in getting into the alien minds of the sheep characters more than it does as a whodunnit. Still, there’s a place in this world for films like this, and if this sounds like something you’d like, you probably will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

How to Make a Killing (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.” 

The extravagantly wealthy Redfellow clan exiles daughter Mary when she gets pregnant with the child of a commoner and refuses to abort it. The father of said child, whom Mary names Becket, dies on the day of his birth, and Mary spends the first several years of his life indoctrinating Becket into the belief that he “deserves” “the right kind of life.” Despite being a lowly civil servant, Mary ensures that Becket gets archery lessons and all of the other hallmarks of an upper class upbringing, which brings him into contact with Julia, an upper class girl with whom he falls in love. Becket shares with Julia that the Redfellow patriarch stipulated in his will that the last surviving member of the Redfellow clan inherits the entire $28M fortune, even those who were previously disinherited. As an adult, Becket (Powell) has a chance run-in with recently married Julia (Margaret Qualley) at the Manhattan haberdasherie where he works, where he’s reminded that she’s upper class and awful; it’s all very Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights.

When he is demoted from salesman to warehouse work at his job because the owner’s son is being slotted into Becket’s position, Becket decides to look into the whole “Let’s kill off my cousins so I can inherit everything” option. He starts with tech money halfwit Taylor (Jude Law’s son Raff), and his attendance of Taylor’s funeral brings him in contact with his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who confesses that he always felt guilty about what happened to Mary but was powerless to stand up to current family head Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris); Warren offers Taylor’s old job to Becket, who accepts. Becket sets sights on his second victim/cousin, Noah (Zach Woods), a pretentious Brooklyn hipster in the mold of Pulp’s “Common People,” whose girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Fenwick) falls for Becket after Noah’s death. Now that he has the love of a paternal figure, a job that he excels in and which nets him enough money to rent a luxurious NY apartment, and a down-to-earth girlfriend, Becket has the life he “deserves,” but it’s still not quite enough. In quick succession, he knocks off his megachurch money laundering cousin (Topher Grace), aviation obsessed uncle McArthur, and faux-humanitarian mega-adopter aunt Cassandra, leaving only Becket, Uncle Warren, and Grandpa Whitelaw in the Redfellow clan’s tontine, at which point Becket takes a pause to decide if he wants to continue with his murder spree. This is complicated by Julia’s re-entry to Becket’s life, begging for a loan for her in-over-his-head husband, and despite Becket’s “careful” alibi-creation for all of the deaths of his relatives, Julia has the evidence that would put him away if he refuses to bail her and her husband out. When Warren dies of natural causes, it all comes down to a showdown with Whitelaw, which we assume can only end one way, since we’ve been told this entire story via flashback that is set in a framing device of Becket in prison awaiting his execution. 

This film has no idea what it wants to be. It’s not quite funny enough to be a true comedy and instead takes a sharp turn into knockoff noir territory, especially when it comes to Julia’s late-film-twist transformation into the femme fatale to serve as a foil to Ruth’s good girl. Qualley is horribly miscast in this role; I’ve been an advocate for her based on her performances in The Substance and Kinds of Kindness despite seeing her plumb the depths with Drive Away Dolls, but it might be time to throw in the towel on defending her against the accusations that she’s just not a very good actor. That may not entirely be her fault, though; this is just a bad movie, and no one comes off well here. I’m generally charmed by Powell and adore Fenwick, but both are underwhelming here, and even Powell’s charisma isn’t enough to make Becket someone in whom we can become emotionally invested. This is a movie about nepotism, explicitly and textually, and I can’t tell if Qualley and Law were cast with a sense of irony or not, but no one “deserves” the kind of life that a multimillion-dollar fortune provides. The only performance that I genuinely loved was Topher Grace’s, who appears in a single scene. Most of the pruning of the Redfellow family tree is done almost perfunctorily, when spending a little more time with them and their awfulness would lend at least some sense of justice to Becket’s actions. Instead, one gets the sense that we’re supposed to find them loathsome despite the fact that their sins are enjoying their wealth in the same way that we see Becket enjoy his when he starts to have his own folding money. A more sincere effort to inspect that would have been more effective, but then that wouldn’t leave enough room for the “comedy” that the film was sold on. It’s messy and inconsistent. How to Make a Killing is too many things and nothing at all: a noir with all of its grit sanded off, a comedy that isn’t very funny, good and bad actors alike having no charisma with one another, and all of it shot with flat, featureless Netflix lighting. No wonder it had no staying power in cinemas.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scream 7 (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I must offer thanks to United Airlines for offering the chance to legally and ethically see the film; now having watched it, I can confirm: it fucking sucks. 

After sitting out Scream VI, Neve Campbell returns in this one as Sidney Prescott, now living in Pine Grove, IN and running a cafe called The Little Latte. This means that she’s hundreds of miles away from Woodsboro when a new Ghostface murders a couple who have rented out Stu Macher’s old house, which has been turned into an AirBnB experience themed after the real-life Woodsboro murders and the Stab film franchise that mythologized them. Ghostface torches the place, symbolically burning down the old. In Indiana, Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named for her best friend who was killed all the way back in Scream, is dating a boy named Ben, who recreates the “Billy sneaks into Sidney’s window” scene from that film, although Sidney isn’t fooled for a moment. Despite what we all inferred (and the previous production teams confirmed) about Sidney’s husband being the Mark from Scream 3, we learn here that she’s married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans (Joel McHale). 

In addition to Tatum’s boyfriend Ben, we also meet the rest of her friend group: Hanna (Mckenna Grace), Chloe (Celeste O’Connor, who hasn’t aged or changed their hair style since Madame Web), and creepy next door neighbor Lucas, whose mother Jessica (Anna Camp) is Sidney’s only real adult friend that we meet. Sidney begins to get FaceTime calls from none other than the presumed long-dead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) just as a new Ghostface appears in Pine Grove to terrorize Sidney, her daughter, and her daughter’s friends. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears on the scene, with more recent franchise additions Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) in tow; her show has been cancelled, and she’s trying to climb her way back into relevance with the twins as her crew. Campbell’s fellow nineties mainstream teen actor Ethan Embry also appears as an employee of the mental institution where Stu has apparently spent the past three decades as an amnesiac John Doe before being released, just a couple of weeks prior to the events of the film. 

Scream is my favorite horror franchise, but it’s been well established that my favorite overall media empire is Star Trek, and there’s a quote from one of the producers of the ill-fated 2001 series Star Trek: Enterprise that I couldn’t stop thinking about all throughout Scream 7. I’ve been unable to relocate it, but I think it was Brannon Braga who said, in essence, that Enterprise failed because the shepherds of the franchise failed to consider that they needed a better reason to produce the series than “it’s time to go back to the well again.” The reason that Scream 4 and the two more recent sequels work so well is because they let the ground lie fallow for a while. Scream 3 (which was the worst of the franchise until this one, and even then was not without its inspired moments) ran everything into the ground, and by the time of Scream 4, there were all new elements of the horror genre to deconstruct. 5cream and Scream VI, likewise, justified their existence by playing with the relationship between legacy sequels, toxic fandom, and copycat killings. The franchise’s central conceit—that Ghostface is a mask anyone can wear and attracts people who are obsessed with horror media—is barely paid lip service here. Mindy mentions that this time, the killer is all about nostalgia, and Chad immediately shuts her down by saying that they’re not doing “the rules” this time because the idea is played out, which is the perfect microcosm of just how little care, thought, or effort mattered in the creation of Scream 7. This exists solely because it was time to go back to the well again, and boy, does it show, and it also does little to assuage accusations that this was an attempt to launder the franchise’s image in the wake of the Barrera controversy. 

The characters here are half-baked at best, and the performances are nothing to write home about, either. Isabel May is, as politely as I can put this, not a very good performer, and learning that Mckenna Grace was cast as early victim Hanna after auditioning for Tatum means that the producers passed on having Grace, who gives consistently strong performances, as Sidney’s daughter. That’s inconceivable! An unjustifiable whiff if ever there was one. When Mindy and Chad gather Tatum’s friend group to tell them that, statistically, one of them is likely a party to the killings, every person present is so thinly drawn that the audience knows they must all be red herrings (ironic, given that the actual killers are somehow even less developed, to the point that one of the actors portraying them had to beg for a couple more scenes of character development). Ben is a computer guy, so he might be able to pull off the potential deep-faking of Stu Macher; Lucas is deep in the “true crime lexicon” and is overly invested in the Woodsboro murders; and Chloe, um, has a crush on Lucas. That’s it! In 1996, Scream up-ended what had become the de facto slasher formula of having a bunch of interchangeable teenagers dying at the hands of an implacable killer; in 2026, Scream 7’s teenaged characters are those interchangeable kids. The most memorable new character here is Jimmy Tatro’s ill-fated AirBnB guest who’s dead by the title card. 

It’s impossible to say where the overreliance on nostalgia in this franchise first entered as the series’ original sin. Scream VI could be argued to have started this, given that the killers in that film were recreating kills from the previous movies using actual collected murder weapons. 5cream addressed nostalgia and its effect on toxic fan culture in its text with relation to the in-universe Stab franchise, but the first Stab film was referenced all the way back in Scream 2, so it’s been a part of this narrative for a long time. Scream 3 may have been the first to take it too far, with the narrative revolving around the shooting of a Stab film. A case can be made for any of them, even the original film, but it is undeniable that there is now a clear winner for the film in which this is the most poisonous. Scream 7 has a moment in which Tatum comes downstairs wearing Sidney’s leather jacket from Scream 2, and the music swells in a way that makes it apparent that we’re supposed to have some kind of emotional investment in this piece of apparel. Not even the biggest Screamhead could make a rational argument that this was a look that needed to be inscribed alongside the actual iconic outfits from the franchise (which are, in order, Rose McGowan’s Tatum’s bosomy sweater, Drew Barrymore’s blonde bob and cozy fleece, and Courteney Cox’s horrible bangs in Scream 3). We have dug through the bottom of the barrel for things to reference. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the killer’s deepfake of Stu isn’t the only one that we see of a prior Ghostface. It makes sense that the AI Stu would be made to look as if he had continued to age since 1996, because he’s supposed to be Stu, or close enough to convince Sidney. Why the hell they didn’t bother to de-age Laurie Metcalf or Scott Foley for their cameos at the end would be a riddle for the ages, were it not for the fact that we know the answer: the film-makers were lazy, and they just didn’t care. 

Every interpersonal conflict here is contrived and unrealistic. The idea that Sidney would try to shield her teenage daughter from all of the horrors she faced at the same age, it absolutely holds no water that this would mean that she’d fail to protect her daughter from the reality that their family will never not be in potential danger from various legacy Ghostfaces. Tatum should be strong, fierce, and self-sufficient, not whining to her mother about her over-protectiveness. This might have worked had Grace been in the Tatum role, but May doesn’t have the chops for it, although she’s not alone in the crop of teen actors when it comes to having talent that fails to pass muster. Original Tatum showed more character and imagination in the garage scene alone than new Tatum does in this entire film. Gale and Sidney go live on TV at one point to try and draw “Stu” out, and Gale gets a rise out of Sidney by asking questions about her offspring, which causes Sidney to get defensive and rip off her microphone. This scene doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long-awaited reunion between characters we’ve known for decades, and instead feels like forced conflict, one that’s immediately dismissed when Sidney gets a call from an under-attack Tatum. Chad and Mindy barely even have a reason to be present, and Mindy’s sudden desire to be the new Gale Weathers is baffling. 

Scream 7 has precisely three good ideas. The first is the opening sequence; that the Macher house has become a bit of a shrine that is of interest to true crime obsessives is a fresh concept, and having a new Ghostface murder a couple of them on the spot is such a good opening that I’m surprised it wasn’t already used before. The second good idea is that the film features the death of one of the Ghostfaces in the middle of the second act, catching the characters and the audience off guard. It was such a refreshing change that I was pleased with it, until I remembered that this was just a variation on the opening from Scream VI. Even one of its few good ideas is just a rehash. Finally, what this return to the well brings to the table is the discussion of AI and deepfakes. Having Stu Macher return and there be a question as to whether it’s really him or someone using his likeness to torment Sidney is perhaps the only bold choice that Scream 7 makes, although it ultimately amounts to little more than the nostalgia bait equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby. There were countless different ways that this could have been incorporated, and better fit the Scream concept. Why not have the lead Ghostface pose as Stu Macher online to indoctrinate other would-be Ghostfaces, with the question of whether or not Stu remaining alive is the same? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of bringing Lillard back, why not have a plot point about members of the younger generation finding something that he pre-recorded, “movie rules for killers” on some VHS that a true crime collector discovers? It’s as bad a fumble as casting the lead of The Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight as Sidney Prescott’s daughter instead of Mckenna Grace. 

As a Scream fan, my nomination is that we all agree that the series ended with Scream VI. Sidney was safe and far away, there was a decent capstone of using all of the previous films without retroactively making them “connected” in an unbelievable way, and Kirby got her redemption. Gale was never going to be able to get direct vengeance for Dewey’s death since “Ghostface” is only an idea and not a being, but she got the closest she was ever going to. Sam and her sister put an end to their family’s killer legacy and walked off into the sunset. That’s more than good enough for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Is God Is (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I live in a majority Black neighborhood in a majority Black city with its very own four-screen cinema just a few bus stops away from my front porch. In the decade or so since that theater has opened, this week is the first instance I’ve ever noticed that the majority of the movies on that cinema’s marquee were helmed by Black directors and Black leads, which suggests that we’re currently experiencing a notable cultural moment in film distribution, at least partially encouraged by last year’s box office success for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Of the three Black-led, Black-directed films screening at The Broad this week, Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is lands the closest to Sinners territory, at least in comparison to Antoine Fuqua’s amoral nostalgia-bait biopic Michael and Boots Riley’s lefty heist comedy I Love Boosters. Is God Is is a dusty, Southern-fried genre flick shot on location on the rural backroads of Louisiana, and thus the project of the trio that most likely benefited from Sinners‘s success. Much like Sinners, it’s also a film that’s more satisfying when it’s setting the stage for its violent climactic showdown than it is when actually depicting that violence, when its tension is supposed to be relieved through cathartic action. In both cases, it’s a fun ride getting there, regardless of the payoffs found at their predetermined destinations.

Aleshea Harris’s feature film debut feels like a natural evolution from her background as a playwright. It’s packed with compelling characters staging a series of standalone showdowns in single-location scenes, each linked via road trip montage. This structure allows formidable actors like Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, and (fresh off her hilarious turn in The Rise & Fall of Reggie Dinkins) Erika Alexander to make major impact with just a few minutes of screentime, rigidly sectioned off in their own hermetic realms. Each of those name-brand performers go toe-to-toe with the film’s up-and-comer leads: Kara Young & Mallori Johnson as telepathically linked twins on a familial revenge mission across the American South. After having essentially raised each other from foster home to foster home, the two young adults are enlisted by their estranged mother (Fox) to kill their even more estranged, abusive father (Brown) in retaliation for heartlessly setting his family on fire, leaving all three women horribly scarred & disfigured. The feistier twin (Young) is excited to be offered a path to tangible retribution & closure, while the kinder twin (Johnson) struggles to hold her sister on a leash, hoping to resolve the violence of the past without exacting further violence in the present. Because this is a revenge thriller, neither kindness nor forgiveness prevail.

Is God Is is funny, stylish, and cool in surprising ways. The twins’ lifelong social isolation resulting from their visible disfigurement has left them intensely strange & mutually obsessed, like a couple of Nells (or, more appropriately, like Letitia Wright’s titular dual role in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins). Harris’s stage theatre background shows in the screenplay’s more allegorical touches, categorizing the twins’ oppositional parents as a small-town showdown between God (Fox) and The Devil (Brown) in a temporally ambiguous, sepiatone version of The South. Between the leads’ volatile sisterly chemistry and the anything-goes chaos of the otherworldly setting, the movie quickly establishes a distinct style & mood despite the familiarity of its road-trip revenge mission genre template. The major letdown, then, is that it doesn’t also deliver on the built-in genre payoffs of that template. Harris proves to be just as weary to get her hands dirty in the film’s violent action as the softer of her two protagonists. We know her characters are doing violent things; they are brutally killing each other with lit matches, rusty gardening sheers, and Biblically-accurate rocks. The movie is just disappointingly squeamish about actually depicting that ultraviolence onscreen instead of just hinting at it. We almost always see the aftermath instead of the point of impact, as if the producers were seeking a PG-13 rating that the crasser lines of Harris’s dialogue were never going to allow.

The most convincingly violent Is God Is gets is in the ice-cold tone of Sterling K. Brown’s villainous performance, suggesting a sociopathic level of cruelty the onscreen action is too timid to match. This is ultimately a very warm, sentimental story about two socially isolated women who only have each other in this otherwise cruel world; it hides all of the nastier business of smashed skulls, burnt flesh, and pierced lungs behind visual obstacles, shielding the audience from the full brunt of impact. This disparity between the level of violence demanded by the genre and the level of violence depicted on the screen calls into question whether Harris was actually interested in making a revenge thriller in particular, or if that screenplay was just the easiest to fundraise production funds for, as opposed to a dialogue-heavy drama. Then again, the last time I remember complaining about this kind of violence-averse squeamishness was in Nia DaCosta’s (otherwise compelling) Candyman reboot, and she later doubled down on horror’s mandatory violent catharsis in the excellent 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Maybe Harris is working her way up to soaking in the bloodbaths demanded by her scripts’ chosen genres. Maybe she’ll be able to leverage the attention earned by this flashy debut to instead pivot away from genre requirements entirely. Either way, this is an undeniably cool calling-card introduction of an exciting authorial voice to the moviegoing audience, and its wide theatrical distribution is an encouraging sign for where the industry is headed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Currents (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Everyone knows what you mean when you describe a film as “a character study,” but I’d like to expand on that genre descriptor to include a new subcategory: the character mystery. Many festival-circuit dramas operate as alienating character studies of inscrutable people—especially women—that the audience must puzzle through only to vaguely understand. The first time this occurred to me was during the local premiere of Red Rooms at the Overlook Film Festival; the film has since been heralded as an era-defining digi voyeurism thriller, but I spent the entire runtime thinking, “Okay what is this woman’s deal???” while each of the protagonist’s peculiar character traits were revealed one scene at a time. Since then, it has occurred to me that there are many great films of the “What is this woman’s deal???” variety, including such classics as Todd Haynes’s Safe, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Christian Petzoldt’s Undine, and the majority of Isabelle Huppert’s filmography. Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents is just the latest addition to that character-mystery canon, an Argentinian variation in the national tradition of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman.

We meet our mystery character outside of her usual environment. Isabel Aimé González Sola plays an Argentinian artist accepting an industry award while abroad in Switzerland, then immediately jumping off the nearest bridge in a shockingly nonchalant suicide attempt. When describing this incident to her sister back in Argentina, she confesses, “I fell into the water,” absolving herself of cause or intent. What we’ve come to learn about her by that point is that she feels fully disconnected from her body and her life, stuck in a constant dissociative state that alienates her from friends, family, and colleagues. A new wrinkle to that feeling is that the bridge “accident” has left her terrified of any & all contact with water, associating the flow of a river’s currents with the ceaseless allure of The Void. She describes her current state as existing in “suspended time,” as she lives out the lyrics of DEVO’s “Out of Syc” while drifting from one social or professional obligation to another. Seemingly, the only thing keeping her from jumping back into The Void is concern for her young daughter, and even that earthly tether is wearing thin.

In one of the most intriguing sequences, our dazed mystery woman is hypnotized by a lighthouse bulb and dissociates for several minutes while imagining the urban domestic scenarios playing out on the city streets below. We might as well assume that she’s under hypnosis for the entire runtime, as every mundane activity that fills her day registers an out-of-body experience, from bath time with the kiddo to passive-aggressive squabbles with the mother-in-law. As a result, we have a less solid sense of who she is than we have of the fluid state she finds herself drowning in. She is, herself, the mystery; all the audience can relate to or repel from is the familiarity of the undefined feeling she’s suffering through. I may have set expectations a little too high in that opening paragraph by likening The Currents to so many cinephile-approved masterworks, since its scene-to-scene payoffs are decidedly quiet & lowkey. It’s a strangely calming experience for what’s effectively a psychological thriller, often pausing its story beats for a quiet stroll through an art museum or a couture photo shoot or a VR headset rainstorm. It’s a mystery without a resolution, designed with the clean lines & jewel tones of a fashion catalog spread instead of more typical psych-thriller mise-en-scène. In that sense, it’s best recommended to fashion-forward fans of The Headless Woman; just because you’re a headless enigma doesn’t mean you can’t pull off a lewk.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).

00:00 Welcome
02:11 Obsession (2026)
09:09 Microcosmos (1996)
18:42 The Housemaid (2025)
25:55 Maya Deren

32:54 The World Cinema Project
41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976)
1:09:39 Lucía (1968)
1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969)
1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Maisie Was a Lady (1941)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For the first time, we open a Maisie picture (this is the fourth) with our leading lady already employed. It’s not very dignified, unfortunately; she’s in a carnival sideshow set up in a contraption with a mirror that makes her appear headless. When troublemaking wealthy alcoholic Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres) tickles her on stage and costs her the job, he allows her to borrow his car to get into town. Maisie takes him up on this offer but ends up spending the night in jail after being pulled over on suspicion of stealing the vehicle. When the judge lets her off per Bob’s admission of complicity in Maisie’s firing and his permission to use the car, he also requires Bob to pay Maisie the amount that she was supposed to receive for the remainder of her sideshow contract, Maisie refuses to take money for nothing, and it all shakes out that Bob will keep her on for the two months of her contract at the sprawling Rawlston manse as a maid. Maisie is taken to the house and introduced to family butler Walpole (C. Aubrey Smith). 

On her first day, she meets Bob’s sister Abigail (Maureen O’Sullivan) as well as her fiancé, Link Phillips (Edward Ashley), but is not aware of their relationship until after Link has tried (and failed) to make a pass at her. The house is full of guests who will be in attendance at the upcoming engagement party for Link and Abigail. They’re all rather hoity-toity and rude to Maisie, embarrassing Abigail so thoroughly that she asks Maisie to be her personal maid, to which our heroine agrees. We get to spend some time with Abigail and learn that, despite all her wealth and finery, the Rawlston family is in disarray; after Mrs. Rawlston’s death, the family patriarch, “Cap,” has become a largely absent presence, sending jewelry that Abigail never wears or cares about in lieu of being present in her (or Bob’s) life. We learn about most of this from Abigail herself, while Walpole relates the same is true for Bob, who won a scholarship for some kind of aviation innovation, but for whom a lack of fatherly interest meant that he abandoned all of his ambitions. Tensions in the house reach a boiling point with the arrival of Diana Webley, a woman Link Phillips previously spurned; he doesn’t see any reason that his money marriage to Abigail should spoil all of the fun that they could have together, and it’s up to Maisie to, once again, save the day. 

Maisie Was a Lady is the best of the Maisie series by a decent margin. Maisie wasn’t terrible, of course, but it wasn’t all that memorable, either, whereas this one hits the ground running right out of the gate. Maisie is still independent, witty, and vivacious, and as the series goes along, she’s simply dropped into place until she gets the chance to observe everyone’s foibles, then deliver a no-nonsense monologue to give them the what-for that sets everything right. For the first time since Maisie, she also gets a love interest in the form of Bob Rawlston, even if their sudden affection for each other comes out of left field in the film’s final moments. With peace restored to the Rawlston household, Abigail asks Maisie to go to Honolulu with the family and to stay on as her companion. Maisie’s eyes light up as she considers it, possibly considering what adventures she might get up to in Honolulu Maisie, but then asks Walpole what kind of woman he foresees for Bob, prompting the old butler to rattle off a description of old money gentility that causes those lights to dim. After the leading men in Congo Maisie and Gold Rush Maisie both turned out to be false flag romantic leads, perhaps I should have seen it coming that Bob was going to win Maisie’s heart in the final moments even if there was no indication of that kind of affection between them in the film’s first hour. It almost feels like this was hastily added at the end to give Maisie a happy ending, should this be the last time that we saw Ann Sothern in this role. 

The screenplay for this one is credited to Betty Reinhardt and Mary C. McCall, Jr., just as the previous films were, but this is the first time that there’s no credit given for Wilson Collison, other than “characters created by.” Reinhardt shares story credit with frequent Frank Capra collaborator Myles Connolly, which may be why this one soars out of all the Maisies so far. It’s almost an obvious choice to have Maisie play “downstairs” in a rich family’s home; this gives her the opportunity to have comic friction with both the guests and the other servants, who are accustomed to the kind of bowing and scraping that it never even occurs to Maisie to consider. It’s all in good fun, although it takes a melodramatic turn in the final act that’s very similar to the one that set up the final events of Maisie. Since these films are all essentially self-contained, it really doesn’t matter if you decide to pick one up at random and give it a chance, and this one is the best so far and doesn’t really require you to know anything about the previous; you could treat this as a standalone picture and have just as much fun (if not more) than if you didn’t know who Maisie was in the first place. 

The film has its old-timey moments, of course. When Mr. Rawlston finally returns to the manor after the one-two punch of his absence and the revelation of Link’s gold-digging nature sends poor Abigail over the edge, Maisie reads him the riot act. Notably, she compares him unfavorably to the abusive fathers of her Brooklyn neighborhood, because at least they knew their children, and, according to Maisie, “Givin’ em the flat of your hand stacks up against giving them nothing.” It’s the only noteworthy tone-deaf moment in an otherwise blistering scorcher of a dressing down, so it gets a pass. Maisie Was a Lady gives us a heaping helping of the gal we love, and, though predictable in the extreme, is worth the eighty minutes it’ll cost you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gold Rush Maisie (1940)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

After her little outing to Africa, Maisie Ravier is back stateside. She’s not headed to check out the ranch she’s supposed to have inherited at the end of Maisie, though. Instead, we find her once again trying and failing to get to her next cabaret job, this time in Tucson. A car that she bought for a bargain to get her the rest of the way breaks down in the desert at night, and she finds her way to a ghost town whose two sole inhabitants are a gruff, hostile young recluse named Bill Anders (Lee Bowman) and his ornery hired hand, Fred Gubbins (Slim Summerville). Bill warms up to Maisie enough to pitch some woo her way, but she won’t have any of it, and the two men are less than receptive to her friendly overtures the following morning. When her car still won’t start after Bill takes a look at it, Maisie sets out on foot, finally arriving at her destination, a few days too late; the cafe owner has already hired different talent when Maisie didn’t arrive as expected. While ruminating on her next move, Maisie learns that there’s a gold rush boomtown developing near Anders’s property. Her kindness to a young girl whose family are following the gold rush earns her a place in their car, and she returns to get her car back and set out for her next adventure, but ends up invested in the future of the Davis family. 

The Davises are bargain bin Joads, former tenant farmers from Arkansas who lost everything in the Dust Bowl. Patriarch Bert remains cheerful and appreciative of his wife Sarah (Mary Nash)’s long-suffering patience, and Sarah herself is the kind of sweetheart who goes hungry so that her family can eat. The family has three children including a baby; the other two are played by notable child actors of the era. “Jubie” Davis was portrayed by Virginia Weidler, who appeared as Katherine Hepburn’s younger sister in The Philadelphia Story the same year as this film, and the perpetually hungry Harold was played by former Little Rascal Scotty Beckett, whose Rascal career as Spanky’s best friend came to an abrupt end once Alfalfa appeared on the scene. Overall, the Davis clan is likable and charming, and it’s easy to believe that Maisie would be willing to spend her last few dollars getting them some groceries and helping them stake out their claim. Of course, there has to be something to keep her present in Arizona to give her rough charms time to thaw Bill Anders’s stony heart so that he offers up his land for the disenfranchised farmers to homestead on when the gold in the area turns out to be so low in concentration that it’s not worth the effort of mining. It’s even less of a romance story this time around, too, since there’s no indication that Maisie has any designs on Anders, other than to get him to warm up a little. 

The format of these movies is starting to emerge, with Maisie as a kind of folk hero who goes from place to place, gets involved in people’s lives, and then moves on like Charlie Kale in Poker Face or Huckleberry Finn. There’s no real continuity to speak of, but one imagines that the studio must have been conscious that people would remember Slim from the first film and Maisie’s relationship with him even if he goes unmentioned, as Maisie’s further adventures are largely free of romance. She pretended to be into the male lead of Congo Maisie only so long as it helped her save another woman’s marriage by demonstrating how poorly suited the man was for love. One would expect that Maisie and Bill would have some romantic entanglement here based on their positioning in the film’s poster, but other than a couple of quick, chaste kisses, there’s nothing to indicate that Maisie reciprocates the tender feelings that she inspires in Bill. If anything, it feels like the first two films were aiming for that Ernst Lubitsch adultery comedy and missing the mark a bit, and decided to drop that entirely to just have Maisie wander the earth like David Banner (ironically, Scotty Beckett would go on to portray the child version of Don Ameche’s character in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait just a few years later). 

Wilson Collison is credited with the story on this one, just as he was for Maisie (which was based on his novel Dark Dame) and for Congo Maisie (which was based on his non-Maisie novel Congo Landing). I’m not entirely sure that’s a worthy credit, however, given that the screenplay was actually pinned by two women, Mary C. McCall Jr. (credited for eight of the ten Maisie pictures) and Betty Reinhardt (who would later co-write Otto Preminger’s Laura and Give My Regards to Broadway). I’m not sure how much credit Collison really deserves for grafting the character of Maisie into a riff on The Grapes of Wrath, which would have been a hot commodity at the time, as John Steinbeck’s novel was published only the year before and the John Ford film adaptation reaching theaters only four months and 11 days before Gold Rush Maisie. That’s important context, since it also means that the somewhat corny-sounding dialogue of the Dust Bowl Okies (ex: “Tarnation, it’s nigh on to supper already”) is actually contemporary. 

Ann Sothern continues to shine in these, and while a lot of her non-comedy dialogue in the first two films had the ring of melodrama about them, her indomitable spirit comes through most clearly here. There’s a real sense of gravitas in her voice as she explains to Bill that the would-be miners have learned that the ore is useless and are holding a meeting about where each is going to go, since they can’t all try to go work the same temporary farm jobs. They’ve got to part for various different destinations, “spreading the starvation around a couple of states and not bringing it on each other,” and it’s quite good stuff. And this time, we get to see Maisie drive off into the sunset, off to spread barbs and charm elsewhere, the next time we see her in Maisie Was a Lady. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond