Einbinder and Anderson in a movie theatre, projector light behind them: "Somehow, watching teenagers get impaled feels good in a place like this"

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Romance, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Angelo Muredda “You talk about it so academically,” reclusive actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) chides filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) about her pitch to revive the slasher series the former anchored in her youth early on in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Rather than being about gender trouble, the pleasure principle, and whatever other high concepts the millennial theory kid Kris might bring to her meta reboot of the not-so-storied Camp Miasma franchise, the actual films, Billy insists, are about something concrete: “flesh and fluids.” Schoenbrun, a neurotic queer filmmaker with an abiding love for genre and a knack for mediating that love through smart metafictional narratives about trans and nonbinary identity, could certainly do worse for an authorial self-insert than Einbinder, whose sexually stunted, voraciously consuming (both movies and candy) Sundance wunderkind Kris is lovably guileless. But preemptively owning up to their own tendency to intellectualize the base pleasures of pulp art doesn’t fully take the sting out of Billy’s criticism, as far as Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma itself is concerned. At once an agreeably campy horror-comedy, an arch portrait of the creative compromises of queer mid-budget filmmaking, and a subtextually ripe queer coming-of-age melodrama-cum-slasher about a fictional trans killer resolving an aloof artist’s hangups about sex and death, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as baroque as its ostentatious title suggests. If it’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts, and not as emotionally gratifying as Schoenbrun’s previous two features, then at least there’s plenty of flesh and fluid behind its more inspired elements.

Tirion Healy peering out from behind a wall in Insectasy

Fantasia Festival ’26: Home Bodies; Godhead; Insectasy

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

HOME BODIES
*/****
starring Emma Ho, Ian Ho, Ess Hödlmoser
written by Adrian Murray, Marcus Sullivan
directed by Casey Walker

GODHEAD
**½/****
starring Sarah Coffey, Kimball Farley, Luke Speakman, Al Warren
written and directed by Mark H. Rapaport

INSECTASY
***½/****
starring Sadie Healy, Lyndall Huber, Jan Roeth, Emmett Roiko
written and directed by Angus Silver

by Walter Chaw Casey Walker, producer of 2024’s breakout arthouse slasher In a Violent Nature, directs Home Bodies, a William Sleator-inflected two-hander starring real-life brother and sister Ian and Emma Ho. They play “Blue” and “Red,” respectively (their names also the colours of their respective jumpsuits), siblings holed up in a well-appointed, multi-room apartment with only each other and a CRT television that’s always broadcasting a puppet-based kids’ show as diversion. Is there any significance to the colours beyond their gendered connotation? Not that I could tell. Blue and Red have a “father” (voiced by Walker) who is a light in a closet that talks to them, and to whom they report their moods and activities now and then. And for a while, they have a mute “friend” called Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), who moves around like a person pretending to be a creepy robot. Is Pal a robot? Doesn’t seem to matter. One day, over a game of “hide and find,” Blue does an awful thing that makes Father angry with them, meaning he stops feeding them and (invisibly) maintaining their environment. Really, what Blue does is not that awful, relative to our understanding of this game’s poorly established rules.

A stoic Jun Ji-hyun surrounded by zombies

Fantasia Festival ’26: Colony

Posted in2026, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Thriller, Zombie

군체
Gunche
***½/****
starring Jun Ji-hyun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Shin-rok
written by Yeon Sang-ho, Choi Gyu-seok
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

by Walter Chaw Colony is Yeon Sang-ho’s return to the zombie feature (after Train to Busan and its animated sequel, Peninsula), a rip-roaring, often fascinating treatise on tech bros, social media, and the dangerous resolve of the mob. Per its name, Yeon’s zombies are hive animals–like ants, for instance, or bees–who gain a communal intelligence through an invisible, scent-based or possibly mycelial network. Using it, they learn from one another how to be better hunters and better evangelists for their “eat of my body, drink of my blood” contagion. They have done what Catholics once feared film could do. Colony‘s BigBad, in the final analysis, is the dangerous ability to connect with a group of people scattered around the world who agree with your worst ideas. When you were a lunatic incel moron creep in the pre-Internet era, you were shunned and disgraced. As it should be. Now? Now if you’re a deranged, flat-earthing, creationist Christian Scientist weirdo, you buy a red hat and join your fuckwit brethren looking for a golden idol who will piss on your adoring, upturned face. Consider how LLM chatbots are merely the poison of external validation mechanized for inhuman efficiency. People will still get tired of you, no matter how proudly you wear your prejudice and ignorance as a personality. An LLM will never get sick of your stupid, violent, grandiose delusions. Yeah, we’re double-fucked.

Rupert Grint look down through a large hole in his floor

Fantasia Festival ’26: Nightborn

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Horror, Lithuania, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio
written by Hannah Bergholm, Ilja Rautsi
directed by Hannah Bergholm

by Walter Chaw I wanted to like Hannah Bergholm’s crimson-spattered folk horror Nightborn more than I did. It is, after all, the kind of thing I like: a Finnish changeling fable that leans heavily into the Czech otesánek fairytale (memorably immortalized by Jan Švankmajer via his freakout masterpiece Little Otik), with a heavy dose of Rosemary’s Baby to spice the hunter’s stew of it. It joins Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love as another stunning essay on post-partum marriage and navigating the shock and condemnation new mothers face when they don’t behave the way they should, and it boasts a monstrous child who conjures up memories for me of reading Ray Bradbury’s “Small Assassin” as a kid myself. Both Nightborn and Die My Love–not to mention Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You–are portraits of “difficult” women taken for granted, despised and ignored, by the people who should love them most. If Nightborn hums with the same ferocious, infernal energy as those films, it ultimately falls short by not putting enough faith in subtext. Its richness is in the complexity of its metaphor; why not leave it as metaphor? Trust in the audience’s ability to accept ambiguity marks the difference between a neat little exercise and a haunting masterwork.

Kristine Froseth taking a selfie in a luxury space

Fantasia Festival ’26: Her Private Hell

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Dougray Scott
written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Esti Giordani
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw Fantasia 2026 opens with another gauzy, roiling, Tsai Ming-liang via Mario Bava psychosexual dreamscape from Nicolas Winding Refn. Her Private Hell, Refn’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, plays in the same sandbox: It’s easy to imagine the gamine, fledgling model played by a blonde Elle Fanning in that film evolving into Her Private Hell‘s brunette “Elle” (Sophie Thatcher), a filmmaker burning through a variety of gaudy facial accessories that hide the essential emptiness of her expression. Her Private Hell is no less stunned, soporific–a feature-length version of the rhapsodic shower sequences from Brian De Palma’s Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Given that composer Pino Donaggio has been recruited to provide the film with a swooning score dripping with harp arpeggios and syrupy strings, I suspect the comparison to De Palma’s oeuvre is more artifact than accident.

Smiling woman's severed head lying on the dirt ground: "Looks like the coin toss came up heads!"

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Posted in****/****, 2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical Release

****/****
starring Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan
written by Sébastien Vaniček & Florent Bernard
directed by Sébastien Vaniček

by Walter Chaw The day my dad died, I was unavailable by phone until evening. My voicemail was full of messages to go to the hospital–there’d been another heart attack and where was I? Hurry. Hurry. When I finally got there, I was directed to a waiting area, where my mom was already camped out with other members of her cult. She pointed to a door. I went through it to find my dad on a gurney, in a shiny black body bag. Eventually, someone came in and unzipped it so I could look at him: blue and ashen and cold. When I returned to the waiting area, I offered my mother a hug, but she pushed me away and turned back to the coterie of strangers collected there, measuring me. I measured them back. A few days later, at the funeral that my dad didn’t want, one of them blamed me for his death. At the unwanted funeral where I was forced to genuflect before an open casket my father definitely did not want, I was confronted with the sight of him now rouged to a garish purple because white morticians don’t know what to do with yellow skin, his blood replaced by a humectant to keep him moist amid our arid environment. Just for a while, you know, until we incinerated him and swept his ashes into a cardboard box we kept in a drawer for years before dumping them out into a lake.

Polaroid of the CAMP cast against green velvet that suggests the woods. Pink, fuzzy, embossed letters: "Fast Times at Camp Girl Horror." By Walter Chaw in white letters underneath.

Fast Times at Camp Girl Horror: FFC Interviews Avalon Fast

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Interviews

by Walter Chaw A new wave of filmmakers has arrived, born and raised in the Internet age without parents capable of warning them there are wolves lurking in the digital forest. I think I only implanted in my children a general dread, a non-specific “be careful” with no strategy for survival. Didn’t it used to be easier? Don’t go into the candy house. Don’t accept rides from strangers. How do I protect my kids from the dangers of a place I don’t really know how to navigate, full of traps I myself can neither identify nor defeat? They were brought up in an environment of instant feedback, of virtual friends, of communities formed by shared niche interests. In my lifetime, I have seen the bullied become the captains of industry and entertainment. I’ve lived long enough to watch nerds not only gain their revenge but become the bullies themselves.

The young women of CAMP in the woods at night: "Camp? You call this a camp? This is a damn outdoor jail!"

Camp (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical Release
***½/****starring Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moorewritten and directed by Avalon Fast by Walter Chaw I'm thinking of an Ani DiFranco song--a fragment, really--called "Hide and Seek" that she's only released as a live cut. You can find it on her 1997 album Living in Clip. It's a spooky tune, just a bass riff on a loop with lyrics about a little girl learning of the hell that is the transition from innocence to experience. I listened to it obsessively in the miserable year before I met the woman who would be my wife: struggling through a series of doomed…
Backrooms' Renate Reinsve in the basement of a furniture store: "The Worst Person in the Raymour & Flanigan"

Backrooms (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release, Thriller

*/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett
written by Will Soodik
directed by Kane Parsons

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to approach Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, the latest addition to the Naïve Wave of films made by filmmakers raised on new media in online spaces. The first is to acknowledge that we’ve had a revolution like this before, when the film brats at the end of the ’60s emerged as the first generation of directors primarily reared on cinema instead of literature and theatre, so even this shift–though it seems retrograde for some of the oldsters in the room (okay, me)–is not the end of the world. It may, however, be the end of understanding movies as a product of tutelage in the language of film. Editing, cinematography, screenwriting–all of that has changed and will continue to evolve. Of course, one of the things to love about film as a medium is its elasticity, isn’t it? It makes perfect sense that the rumblings of revolution are happening in horror, that most flexible and reactive of genres.

Midori Francis staring at a spoon in Saccharine: "Uri Geller, don't fail me now"

Saccharine (2026)

Posted in2026, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release

***½/****
starring Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor
written and directed by Natalie Erika James

by Walter Chaw The bad guy in Natalie Erika James’s Saccharine is self-loathing. Self-loathing the ego-killer, the murderer of confidence, the enemy of joy. Saccharine completes a loose trilogy for James, with each entry to some extent exploring the monstrous mutation of self-hate under the tectonic effort required to repress it. It is a fog and the fire in which we burn. Relic detailed the guilt of a daughter who has lost sight of her dementia-ridden mother. Apartment 7A dealt with a young woman who has made socially unacceptable choices to achieve fame (recontextualizing Rosemary’s Baby, and Roman Polanski, in the process). Now Saccharine puts body image under the microscope. Her films are blueprints of the bans imposed on women by multiple, often conflicting (if uniformly brutal), cultural standards. Over three films, James has shown herself to be blunt but not didactic–a trick that’s harder to pull off than it seems. Hers is a voice for any person trapped in a liminal space between communities that would reject them. She’s a mixed-race person living in a predominantly white country (Australia). She’s a woman in a male-dominated industry who has, so far, only helmed projects centring women. With her third film, she’s taking on queer desire, the Asian diaspora, and what it feels like to be trapped in a body that doesn’t align with how you’ve been programmed to perceive yourself. The pain of dislocation in Relic, Apartment 7A, and Saccharine is crystalline and pure, aided by lead performances from Emily Mortimer, Julia Garner, and Midori Francis, respectively, that are naked, ugly, and raw. James is an artist. I feel seen by her work.

A shark fin poking out of the water, a plane about to crash: "Here comes my DoorDash, right on time."

Thrash (2026) + Deep Water (2026)

Posted in2026, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, Horror, New Zealand, Spain, Theatrical Release, Thriller

THRASH
*/****
starring Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Djimon Hounsou
written and directed by Tommy Wirkola

DEEP WATER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Angus Sampson, Molly Belle Wright, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Pete Bridges and Shayne Armstrong & SP Krause and Damien Power
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw If the first stories we told each other in those caves were warnings–horror by any other name–then it’s a good idea to wonder what kind of warning our horror entertainments are desperate to communicate. Since they’re expressions of the subconscious surfing the (literally) bleeding edge of the zeitgeist, they must reveal something about our common fears. Why was The Exorcist a box-office phenomenon? Or The Blair Witch Project? We think it’s our choice, what we make and what we want to see, but it’s not. Not entirely. When we speak of the scale of time in human evolution, we are after all just a flicker of an eyeblink removed from hunting and gathering in a primal night. That being said, monsters in movies are reliable bellwethers indicating a specific pollutant in the collective swamp, and the classic ones resurface when the environment is most conducive to their survival. The latest Frankenstein riffs reframe Mary Shelley’s story as the first salvo against the hubris-driven creation of artificial intelligences. Recent adaptations of Dracula couldn’t help but be allegories for evil foreigners buying up real estate and perving on our women. Now, a couple of new films join last year’s Dangerous Animals, the upcoming Chum, the deathless Sharknado franchise, and still others in asking the question: why have so many shark movies arrived in a toothy school all at once?

Picture of a sarcophagus: "If Lee Cronin's The Mummy, who's the Daddy?"

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Ireland, Spain, Theatrical Release

The Mummy
***½/****
starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels like a lost Chicho Ibáñez Serrador joint, the completion of a loose trilogy (with Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? and The House That Screamed) comprising tough, thorny horrors centred on irresolvable grief and the excruciating suffering of children. The bulk of it even takes place in an old dark house like the one in The House That Screamed, and features one of Serrador’s countrywomen, Spanish actor Laia Costa, as half of an expat couple living in Cairo. Costa’s Larissa is pregnant. Her husband Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a journalist. They’ve been in the country for five months with their offspring, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace as the older version (both are phenomenal)) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams, then Shylo Molina)–still resident aliens at a stressful moment in their lives. The theme of familial upheaval and unrest is the first of many teeming anthills The Mummy kicks over. (I almost want to say “literal cans of worms,” because the picture’s so overstuffed with disgusting images.) Another is the strain on a marriage when a child is lost, and the similarly unique strain when that child is recovered and requires constant supervision and care. Katie, see, is abducted. She’s the princess fair, the quarry of an evil witch. She’s spirited away through crowded city streets as her father gives chase. But Charlie’s hampered by supernatural interference. His vision narrows and he gets confused. And just like that, Katie’s gone.

Larry Fessenden glowering at us in a leather jacket: "Larry stories to tell in the dark"

Trauma or, Monsters All (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Theatrical Release, Vampire, Werewolf

***½/****
starring Laëtitia Hollard, Aitana Doyle, Addison Timlin, James Le Gros
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw There’s an immediacy to Larry Fessenden’s films, a lack of any intermediary between his characters and the viewer that can be exquisitely uncomfortable. Stories told through peepholes, they can feel like plays performed in a small venue, an intimate encounter ever threatening to spill over into the crowd. Credit his immersive, often suffocating sound design, an expertise demonstrated lately in his radio side project, “Tales from Beyond the Pale.” (I first saw Fessenden’s Habit on VHS, and the audio on its recent 4K upgrade is a revelation.) Credit also, of course, his sober, mature scripts, which deal with childhood, memory, and fear through the prism of fully formed, imperfect characters trapped in the amber of trauma that can’t be exorcised. For Fessenden, horror exists at the place where the visceral intersects with the philosophical–where the meat meets the mind. What happens to one when the other begins to develop fissures? When hairline cracks develop and let the sadness in? Consider the little boy (Erik Per Sullivan) in Fessenden’s masterful Wendigo, who learns one terrible winter that the shadow at the bottom of the stairs sometimes sees you even if you leap quietly, so quietly, across the top, where the light from the entryway paints a white square like a lepidopterist’s frame. Fessenden’s films are all variations on that species of terror, that variety of loneliness: its beginnings and endings and the long half-life in between, where fear metastasizes in unpredictable ways. He is a poet of the hard truth that being by yourself is the essential human condition.

Close-up of a harried Samara Weaving: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never Weaving"

Ready or Not (2019) + Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Posted in2019, 2026, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical Release, Thriller

READY OR NOT
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Andie MacDowell
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME
**/****
starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There’s an old chestnut that you can always tell who we’re going to war with next by the villains in our mass entertainments. I hope that’s true, because over the past few years, the bad guys in movies have been explicitly and almost exclusively the rich. No warfare except class warfare, amiright? That’s one of the reasons I loved Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s 2019 thriller Ready or Not, a key example of the dam breaking in the proletariat’s tolerance for the excesses of the bourgeoisie. It’s also a crackerjack horror contraption that establishes fresh lore without making lore the purpose of its existence, and it minted a genre superstar in Samara Weaving following years of strong showings in cult triumphs (like The Babysitter, Mayhem, and Guns Akimbo). Should the Evil Dead series get another reboot, Weaving is the natural heir to Bruce Campbell’s throne, possessed of the same A-list good looks, the same elastic expressiveness, the same gift for slapstick and self-effacing sense of humour.* Ready or Not really feels like a modern screwball classic–a genre metastasis of the marriage comedies of the 1940s, starring the new Carole Lombard and a few gallons of blood.

Jesse Buckley/The Bride hooked up to wires on an examination table: "Buckley's mixture"

The Bride! (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical Release

*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening
written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how excited I was for this. I love the Frankenstein myth for how malleable it is, how easily it slots into various syndromes and traumas. How contemporary it is, always, in its dissection of the masculine will to power. It can be told from the perspective of the pain of Icarus or the agony of Daedalus. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives; unwholesome desires, lost weekends. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was, of course, the shit, a true progressive two centuries ahead of her time who likely helped a transgender man assume his new identity and kept a piece of her drowned husband’s heart in a folded copy of his poem Adonais. That poem is an elegy for John Keats. It’s arguably the best thing Percy Shelley ever wrote, not the least for the slight undertone of disingenuousness in its profusion. It’s like a Smiths song. This is my favourite line from it: “He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely.” I don’t think Percy liked how Keats was a genius while he, Percy, was not. I know that Keats, at least, was leery of Percy’s attention, especially as Percy began their relationship by dismissing his work. It doesn’t matter. I love how Mary Shelley chose Adonais as the shroud for her husband’s pickled heart. She was as good a literary critic as she was an author–and she was a phenomenal author. Mary would’ve torn Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! apart.

Ghostface wielding a knife: "Like I said, some people will die."

Scream 7 (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical Release

*/****
starring Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Courteney Cox
screenplay by Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick
directed by Kevin Williamson

by Walter Chaw Follow me for a second: If you were of limited morality, you would make the decisions that went into Scream 7. And as a person of limited morality, it’s very possible, nay, probable, that you lack some of your factory-allotted share of human empathy. Depending on the kind of asshole you are, you may even lack empathy altogether, thus qualifying you for corporate management and elected positions. Likely, you’ve become quite wealthy on the backs of others. But without empathy, you’re incapable of creating or understanding art, and so you make the decisions that went into Scream 7. Your cultural analogue is the bad guy from The Incredibles, Syndrome. You, who pray for machines to do what others do naturally, so that others will look at you the way they look at them. You, who are arrested at the point in childhood when you watched gifted but otherwise less-privileged kids outpace you in every measurable category. Still, it’s not the same, is it? You know you weren’t born exceptional, and your jealousy makes you shrunken and vile. Now everyone else suffers for your mediocrity.

Rachel McAdams looming with a spear: "Abolish ICE"

Send Help (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Sam Raimi, Horror, Theatrical Release, Thriller

**½/****
starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Dennis Haysbert
written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It’s broad. Obvious broad. So broad that I suspect if you got too close to it, holes would start to appear, like graphics in a 16-bit video game. But for a year that’s started this dismally, this inhumanely, this dominated-by-the-little-men-who-rule-us, who respond to any perceived humiliation–especially from the women they’re trained to fear and despise–with deadly tantrums, Sam Raimi’s Send Help has the benefit of being bang on the nose. Its central manbaby is failson nepo-CEO Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a hissable villain who likes to sexually harass women at work while elevating old frat buddies into powerful positions within the business his father founded. It’s hard to suss whether Bradley’s company is meant to have a real-world analogue because, in truth, it could be a vicious skewering of any number of companies run by little princes who inherited the role, then used every one of their bad traits to maintain their position as petty kings of a shit castle. A tiny-dicked morlock exactly like Bradley convinced me to stop climbing the ladder and start questioning the way our society programs us to believe that salaries and titles are tantamount to morality and accomplishment, when in reality they’re more often evidence of the opposite. Capitalism is WOPR’s conundrum: the only way to win is not to play the game.

The Long Walk (2025) – 4K Ultra HD

The Long Walk (2025) – 4K Ultra HD

Posted in2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Stephen King

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A–
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

Jennifer Lawrence holding a baby while sitting on a porch with Robert Pattinson: "Little JD here just loves the couch for some reason"

Die My Love (2025) + Keeper (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical Release, Thriller, UK

DIE MY LOVE
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Burch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz
directed by Lynne Ramsay

KEEPER
***½/****
starring Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss
written by Nick Lepard
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw A woman’s body is the battleground we savage, collateral damage in the litigation of collective fear: battered, bloodied, stripped of dignity and individuality. Every religion is founded on the control of it, and most secular bans are, too. A woman is blamed for our knowledge of good and evil, a woman’s beauty for the Trojan War. The opening of a woman’s “box” unleashes all the evils of the world. It is the incubator of our anxieties, the beginning and the end, the salvation and the sin. Her body is the rich, fertile black of the richest loam, and when blood and semen fall upon it, monsters grow. It’s always a trap, and very seldom a person; always a fatale, never merely a femme. It is the Grail, and men, the knights errant in thrall to it. Small wonder that so many of our horror films are about a woman’s body and the florid, manifold violations men visit upon it. More still are about women proving both stronger and stranger than men could ever begin to imagine. No wonder the malleability of flesh, the perverse elasticity of skin, like a scrim stretched between states of being, is where we centre our notions of identity and nurse our fetishistic fascinations. We magnify and romanticize their difference. We make a woman’s body an object of worship, a golden calf that, if we regard it as such, suddenly becomes the core of four of the ten Old Testament Christian Commandments instead of only three. Six, if we also consider her body property to be coveted and stolen.

Xin in The Sun Rises on Us All, Johnston in Obsession

TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.