Bring Her Back (2025)

Score: 5 / 5

Some movies were just meant for you. You know? I had that experience once this year with HIM and now, again, with Bring Her Back. Before I finally got to it -- having taken most of the summer off --  I rewatched the Philippou brothers' Talk to Me (2022), which I remember liking but not feeling strongly about. The rewatch changed my opinion, so I'll likely have to revise my old review, and made me quite excited for this film, about which I knew absolutely nothing. The title suggests something similar to their previous venture, involving a dead female and some attempts at reviving her, right? Sure. But Bring Her Back is so much more.

I used to say that the new Big Three in new inventive horror -- Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and Robert Eggers -- started with an intensely focused initial film and delivered sophomores much broader and weirder and angrier. And the Philippous do the same here, crafting a film so mysterious and intense and strange that I felt like my sofa was vibrating beneath me. Rarely have I been this uncomfortable and unsure in a movie in my own living room. Even with its well-lit and brightly colored visuals, a far cry indeed from Talk to Me, which threw me from the start. And not even because it's wholly unpredictable, though I confess to having had no idea whatsoever what was in store for our protagonists, stepsiblings Andy and Piper, played by equally excellent Billy Barratt and Sora Wong.

A delicious Sally Hawkins reigns over this story as Laura, an eccentric and delightful new foster mother for two orphans. She's a free spirit and a former social worker and she's one of the most emotionally terrifying creatures I've ever seen on screen. She's got ulterior motives, you see, and her explicit preference for one of her new charges should raise your hackles. Their little family -- including Laura's other stepson, who is mute, after the untimely and tragic death of Laura's biological daughter -- has a unique dynamic I found endlessly fascinating in a film founded on the believability of their unbelievable relationship.

I won't say more for fear of spoiling it. This is an exceptional film to go into totally cold. It suggestively pulls from multiple horror subgenres, with a heady result of nasty influences meant to keep you off-kilter and anxious. A few moments are sure to have you shaking your head and muttering "what?!" through your wince. Anyone familiar with emotional abuse, take heed: this will trigger you badly, and once it starts, it doesn't stop; there are similar vibes in Resurrection and Alice, Darling which are similarly upsetting. And that's not the whole hog, either: I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have been in the foster system and now witness two endangered kids desperate for help and being institutionally unable to get help for their very real and very urgent situation. 

The Long Walk (2025)

Score: 4 / 5

It's become somehow fun for people to either adore or detest Stephen King -- especially his adaptations -- and I don't have the slightest interest in those conversations. King is a master of horror fiction, that much has always been clear, and I'm rarely more intrigued than when a new title surfaces. While I've been a longtime personal fan of his work, I'm by no means an expert or even a completionist. Yet. So this novel, published in 1979 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, was not one I had read before, and I was eager to experience it. Little did I know that it would blow me away.

If you've seen the trailer, or seen the title itself, you already know the plot. A simple concept becomes much more, though, in King's imagination, as he imbues diverse characters with such fascinating psychological quirks that they end up being the story far more than the plot is. His imagined America, here, is bleak and evil, and the characters are cogs in a dystopian machine, lorded over by a totalitarian military regime that feels shockingly close to where we're currently headed. Think something between The Hunger Games and The Handmaid's Tale, and that's the kind of haunting mess you'll have stuck in your head after watching this film.

Which is apt, as it's helmed by Francis Lawrence himself, director of most of the Hunger Games film series (and Constantine, I Am Legend, Water for Elephants, and Red Sparrow). He melds quite well, here, with King's story of adolescent male bonding -- rather typical of his work -- in a somewhat retro version of Americana, set in remote rural Maine. I can only imagine the difficulty with which writer JT Mollner had to grapple in dramatizing this story for the screen, visually monotonous as it is and with a literally set pace of 3mph. Yet Mollner's sheer brilliance in Strange Darling should have prepared me for the psychological thrills he'd deliver here, on the edges of civilization and civility alike. There's a literary sensibility to this film I have trouble identifying, but it has something to do with Steinbeck and Bradbury. And the characters' dialogue is never less than riveting, as it's pretty much all we -- and they -- have to go on. What else can you do while walking endlessly by necessity?

I don't really have much else to say, so forgive the coming non-sequiturs. The actors are all excellent, especially leads Cooper Hoffman (yes, Hoffman) and David Jonsson (making a huge case for leading man stardom, after Alien: Romulus), the latter of which was so charming and charismatic in this film I sometimes had trouble believing he was suffering at all. Talk about literature; Jonsson is the film's Samwise Gamgee. Judy Greer, Charlie Plummer, and Mark Hamill are all grim and suitably entertaining, though none are really given any character depth to feel like high points in the film. The scenes of horror -- and I do mean pure, unadulterated, violent and gross and shocking horror -- truly upset me in this film, perhaps because I didn't expect it of Lawrence. This is a hard R rating, for sure, and even someone too accustomed to such things may find parts of this film difficult to endure. I sure did.

This is going on my list of favorite King adaptations, for sure. It's a somber affair, one rife with elevated ideas and major themes woven with care and compassion for its characters. Depicting a hard world like this can so easily result in flattened character archetypes and forced action; this feels raw and immediate in a way that's difficult to put into words. This is along the lines of The Green Mile or The Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Claiborne, even Stand By Me, in terms of King's work, and I just loved it, despite sweating profusely and weeping loudly during our screening. The film's climax was a tad disappointing to me, but no less satisfying for it, and by the time the credits started, I was a mess. Thankfully, that meant I stayed in the darkened auditorium and heard the original song "Took a Walk" by Shaboozey and Stephen Wilson Jr., which is already my choice for best original song of 2025. What an extraordinary final touch to an already highly successful film.

Locked (2025)

Score: 1.5 / 5

The fourth cinematic version of this story, Locked manages to be a kinetic and zippy ride that kept me guessing as to the direction it was headed. It was also repetitive to a fault and quite boring for me. This crime thriller may be some folks' cuppa, but it was not mine.

Bill Skarsgard brings his formidable skills to the fore as Eddie, a petty criminal who just wants to be free of his sins and live a safe and secure, if not comfortable, life with his young daughter Sarah. Here, he's an anxious, panicky weasel of a man whose desperation lands him in a "Dolus" (I don't speak car; is this a real thing? I don't care), a luxury SUV pimped the fuck out with all the bells and whistles you can (and can't) imagine. It's sitting conspicuously in the middle of an urban lot, unlocked, and so he naturally gets in to see what he might nab. When the car locks him in, he can't escape, attempting suddenly urgent violence and cutting his arm in the process, but to no avail. Then the digital screen begins to ring.

There's a long tradition of single-location movies with a cast of one or two actors, the best of which hinge on claustrophobia and psychological distress. Yet director David Yarovesky and his cinematographer and editors don't do much to highlight those aspects, despite almost the entire screenplay taking place in close, limited perspective on Eddie. We're taken in highly energized visual flights around the vehicle, especially in moments when it gets piloted remotely, and we soar high above, before, and behind it as it careens through city sprawl and mountainous curves alike. It's a small frustration, perhaps, but seems ill-chosen in a film meant to force us into a certain headspace.

Speaking of our remote pilot, Anthony Hopkins plays the film's antagonist, William, whose car Eddie has woefully entered. His trap is highly moralistic, sparked by a twofer personal tragedy that apparently caused sociopathic madness, and he preaches about it at length. Mostly invisible during the film, Hopkins uses his iconic voice to devastating effect, more lucid and vicious than we've seen (or, rather, heard) from him in quite a while. I should have been overjoyed by the time he graces our eyeballs by the film's climax, but by then I was so annoyed by what the screenplay created him to be that I just wanted the movie to end. Unfortunately, the climax is far too lengthy and redundant for any such simple finale.

Probably my most significant gripe with the film is its insistence on thematic -- read, moral -- ambiguity. Eddie doesn't even break into the car initially; I'd have liked a film that made him a real bad guy and then asked us to endure and consider his suffering. And suffer he does: William's bells and whistles include several torture devices and practices, which he unleashes with chilling glee. But, for all the screenplay's pontificating about ethics and legality and morality, and for all William's cleverness and vigilantism, he's very clearly labeled insane and sadistic, not unlike the lesson-teaching evils in Saw movies. So we have a bona fide monster -- personal tragedy notwithstanding -- literally torturing a highly sympathetic opportunist for 90 minutes. There's almost nothing of interest, to me, in that premise. Or in its execution here.

Perhaps most egregiously, to that point, is an extended sequence of pure horror as William directs the vehicle to slaughter other criminals on the street and then to terrorize and nearly kill Eddie's young daughter. It's this kind of tasteless trash that really boils my blood, especially as, while these scenes are occurring, William continues his endless monologue. The takeaway from the film, ultimately, is that wealthy people -- the literally crazy rich -- are a blight on society. That the "haves" can and do torture the "have-nots" and that that's unjust. No shit, Sherlock! And, for all its ado, it fails to elicit audience investment because it's never so dour that we don't think for a single minute that the quietly righteous Eddie will die. Of course he -- and we, by extension -- will escape this trap and live peacefully and more thankfully with our loved ones and eschew further crime. So the nonstop torture was really just for...fun? I think not.