By Shaheena Sheikh

You’re watching a movie, the tension is sky-high, two characters have just had a devastating argument, and one of them storms out of the room. Your brain is naturally wired to follow the drama—you expect the camera to cut to the hallway, or at least show the other person crying. Instead, the director does something strange. The camera just stays there. It lingers on a sunlit, empty hotel curtain fluttering in the breeze (Aftersun), or stares blankly at a cold, towering concrete wall after everyone has walked off-screen (Columbus).

For a second, you might think, “Did the editor forget to cut? Is my screen lagging?”

We’ve been completely conditioned by mainstream Hollywood to crave non-stop stimulation. If a scene doesn’t have explosive dialogue, rapid-fire cuts, or immediate plot progression, we treat it like a boring lull in pacing—a mistake, even. But these “empty frames” aren’t empty at all. They are actually a psychological blueprint for what’s happening deep inside a character’s mind. By deliberately forcing us to look at spaces where nobody is standing, independent films like the aforementioned do something magical: they turn a simple room into a canvas for raw human emotion. Independent cinema uses quiet, negative space to talk about massive things—like heavy grief, feeling out of place in the world, or deep longing—in a way that spoken words are just too clumsy to handle. Let’s talk about why the moments where “nothing happens” are actually the parts of a movie that stay with you the longest.

The Ozu Legacy & Reclaiming Stillness in the Modern Age

To understand how we got here, we have to travel back to mid-century Japan and look at the work of legendary filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu. Long before modern

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By Olivia Charis

Five years ago, I was a Black girl who lived five minutes from the Barataria Wetlands Preserve. I hopped between schools, most of them predominantly white. I was angry. I was awkward. My father owned a gun. Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama did not use me as source material.

The Drama is a psychological romance about engaged thirty-somethings Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), who are just a few days shy of their wedding. In a drunken game of confession, with friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Emma admits that she fantasized about committing a school shooting when she was fifteen. Her inborn unilateral hearing loss, which Charlie once found “sexy”, was actually not something she was born with, but the result of a shooting practice gone wrong.

Despite A24’s painstaking efforts to hide Emma’s secret before the premiere, the film somehow manages to ignore her personhood? throughout its entire hour and forty-five minutes. Her character feels like a ghost haunting the plot, with Borgli centering Charlie’s struggle to acclimate to this newfangled view of his fiancée. In the opening scene, he muses about his love for Emma while crafting his wedding speech. A few minutes later, he is replaying the times she yelled at obnoxious drivers, throwing away his “Coffee or I’ll Shoot” mug, and hallucinating about her killing him in their home.

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By Peyton Robinson

This Essay was originally published on January 14th, 20020. This post is part of our “Greatest Hits, “ where we re-share prior pieces that are worth reading no matter the year.

Watching my favorite films is always a comfort in times of emotional stress. Being inserted into a world outside of my own, whether that world is funny, scary, or thrilling, has always done the job. However, as I landed on a rewatch of Nightcrawler recently, I was struck with a new level of realization that this film is closely tied to the anxieties about world affairs that I was looking to escape, albeit semi-indirectly. The film doesn’t deal with racial oppression, nations on fire, or impending war; rather, it explores media mistrust and the intentional inaccuracy of information being delivered to the public.

Nightcrawler follows Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a petty criminal who turns to “night crawling”– filming accidents, tragedies, and other calamities, and then selling the footage to news companies — when slight larcenies lose their thrill. His relationship with KWLA director, Nina Romina (Rene Russo), drives the film, as she asserts that the more horrifying the footage is to their viewers, upper-middle-class suburban white families, the higher the ratings. In response, the already left-of-north moral compass of Lou becomes completely demagnetized.

“Fake news” and biased media in today’s culture are undeniably the driving force of political unrest all over the world: When objective events fall victim to subjective manipulations and partialities, ignited issues only metastasize. Nightcrawler delves into the unethically authorized powers of modern newscasting, and how its influence is a force that augments the agitation of domestic and foreign affairs in any, and every, nation. Television news is new wave political propaganda. Information is an industry, not a charity, and falsities, when coy enough to be ambiguous, funnel funds and keep viewers tuning in like leeches, desperately needing to know something, and often obliviously unsure if it’s honest.

Confirmation bias is arguably the largest influence on what gets broadcast, and what stations viewers choose to watch, and this cyclical relationship is a toxic one. People want their deep-seated prejudices verified. Nina, as the figure representative of the industry, is constantly pushing the KWLA agenda: urban crime creeping into the suburbs. Nina reinforces this not only through the content she demands, but through snide comments like “A carjacking in Compton…that’s not news now is it?” Laid out explicitly, Lou’s supply and demand are bonded by the desire for white victims at the hands of poor people of color. The agenda of the KWLA morning news demonizes the image of what urban means, and perpetuates an aversion to a constructed profile of minorities in the area. Lou chuckles through the process of choosing which radio call to pursue, as he wants victims, but “not the kind that live on 6th and Rampart.”

News is redefined by the station to only apply to the confirmation biases of individuals in a position of privilege. Ideas of class and color are projected onto tragedies that would remain brutal and horrific even if shrouded in anonymity. Consequently, the information channeled into the homes of their audience is handpicked to sustain antipathy against poor minorities by reframing racism and classism as justifiable fears that are validated every morning by the new report.

This further mirrors how popular news media exploits people of color as devices for white fear and then expresses disclination towards other forms of their expendability. Rick (Riz Ahmed) serves as a prime example. Homeless and jobless, he represents underprivileged people of color, whose desperation and desire to make a better life for themselves makes them prime targets for manipulation at the hands of those most powerful. Lou often dangles compensation over Rick’s head like a treat for a dog, only to break it in half and pocket the rest for himself. Blaming his own covert corruption on Rick, Lou cites a lack of initiative for Rick’s failure to earn more money. Rick is told he will only be rewarded by standing up for himself, but he is continually punished, and ultimately discarded when he does so. It’s a habitual, threatening mind game, satisfying and effective for Lou, but meant to keep Rick vulnerable and in submission. Rick, along with other individuals of color, are pawns in an information game intended for everyone’s “benefit,” but their own.

The precise reason for the success of propaganda through news is that media companies control the angle. Context isn’t weaved into the footage, rather it’s created by its projectors. Lou, wielding a camera, doesn’t simply capture an image — he creates one.

He drags dying bodies across the concrete to establish a better frame, explaining that a good image doesn’t just draw you in, but keeps you there. He sneaks into a home barraged by gunfire and organizes family photos around bullet holes for a maximum emotional draw. He sits idly by, hiding in the bushes at an active crime scene and allows murderers to escape, so that the story can continue, and a buck can be made. He enters said crime scene and films dying bodies up close, because if it bleeds, it leads.

Lou, in combination with Nina, neglect to provide adequate context for any of the events they broadcast on the news. Lou’s staging of crime scenes disregards ethics and disrespects human lives for aesthetics. It serves as an explicit parallel to manipulating a narrative for an optic aim. Nina, inserting B-roll of crying kids onto new stories and scripting anchors to incessantly utter words like “vicious,” “on the loose,” and “grisly,” formulates an inauthentic context and instigates heightened fear in KWLA viewers, and the community at large. Both Lou and Nina remain stagnant, permitting the unnecessary rise of body counts and public alarm to thrive in order to maximize their payout and keep viewers consumed, thinking their lives depend on it. Nightcrawler often straddles the line between legality and morality in the information industry, but Lou and Nina aren’t truly concerned with either.

“On TV it looks so real.”

Vision isn’t objective. Not even evidence is objective. Information is victim to manipulation, exploitation, and confirmation bias. Agendas are pushed through the reframing, staging, and perspectives of television news. This fervent desire to sway public opinion into a company’s own constructed box is most simply defined as propaganda. It’s weaponized manipulation of information to keep viewers coming to your channel, consumed by the sensation, either morbidly or desperately. Nightcrawler glaringly addresses that when faced with such intrepid dishonesty, it’s easier on the mind, though more dreadful on the soul, to perceive it as the truth. This is the reality of the information industry, spearheaded by television news media.

In the film, white suburbia is pit against urban people of color. In our world, it can be this, or it can be left v. right, science v. religion, or generally speaking, any one group v. the freedom of another — whether that’s the freedom to or freedom from is up to those behind the scenes. News media today is moreso a slew of opinions than an objective, truthful report. In this age of global affairs and television news, context is often left unknown or debated, and Nightcrawler displays this fearlessly. For us out here in the real world, all we can do is read all the perspectives we can and try to infer that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Right now, it’s more important than ever.

This Essay was originally published on May 8th, 20021. This post is part of our “Greatest Hits, “ where we re-share prior pieces that are worth reading no matter the year.

The Stephen Sommers-penned script for 1999’s blockbuster The Mummy introduces the half-Egyptian, half-English Evelyn (Evy) Carnahan played by Rachel Weisz in the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities as “a rather uninteresting British girl: eye-glasses, hair-in-a-bun, long boring dress, your typical prudish nightmare.” But in a swift turn that is a terse encapsulation of the place Weisz’s Evy holds in the hearts of women the world over, the script prophesies: “We’re going to fall in love with her.” And indeed, we do.

As is the case with most blockbusters, scripts are written before leads are cast, and so Sommers’ script didn’t foresee Weisz’s beauty. Universal Studios initially auditioned American actresses for Evelyn’s role before finally landing on the British actress. Sommers says he auditioned the relatively unknown Weisz about five times before ultimately casting her based on the charming chemistry she had with the film’s other lead, Brendan Fraser. This was all for the best. Though critics enjoyed the movie for being generally fun but not groundbreaking, they loved Weisz’s performance: Roger Ebert’s many favourite phrases from the film are uttered by Evy; The Hollywood Reporter said Weisz is deft at keeping pace with the overwhelmingly male cast. Certainly a commercial hit at the time of its release, the film is now a classic, beloved for how lovable Fraser is as the beefy but kind hero Rick O’Connell, but also for the image of the nerdy adventurer Evy, showing generations of women that a love for books can be sexy. Evy is the quintessential ‘90s heroine, possessing the gumption of her male counterparts, but outshining them in the intellect department. All this is undeniable — Evy is, to this day, a gem. However, there is a scene in The Mummy that few talk about but that is impossible to glaze over because of how striking it is.

O’Connell and his team lose all their equipment at the start of their journey to the ancient city of Hamunaptra to find the Book of Amun-Ra. Their barge goes up in flames as it is invaded by the Maji, who want to prevent the Westerners from awakening the ancient curse of Imhotep. Evy has lost all her clothes, so the women in a village they stop at to stock up on supplies dress her. As O’Connell buys camels, Evy steps out of a throng of women in burkas wearing a black, gauzy outfit with a jeweled lace veil draped across the bottom of her face, her hazel eyes heavily kohled. Weisz is smiling that smile Evy has on whenever she is proud of herself for knowing something no one else does. She knows she looks stunning in her flowing garb held tight around her waist by a belt of shiny coins like the ones worn by Middle Eastern belly dancers — an orientalized dream. “She’s changed into a gorgeous, tightly fitted, Bedouin dress,” the script says. Fraser as O’Connell blushes — she is a sight to behold.

It’s a scene that’s only rivaled in sexiness and accompanying daring by the one wherein Evy kisses Arnold Vosloo’s Imhotep to keep him from hurting O’Connell and her brother Jonathan. She uses her body, her femininity (as opposed to her mind, which she flexes in every other scene), in a way reminiscent eerily of Jasmine in 1992’s Aladdin, when she slinks along hopelessly near the film’s end, dressed scantily in a blood-red outfit trying to seduce Jafar. These two scenes are worth interrogating because, in both, Evy cuts a figure with a layered history: a negative image of an orientalized “jew” (a fictional image that lumps all “others,” that is, non-white, non-Christian peoples, be they Middle Eastern or North African, into the category of “the jew”) integral to the way stories are told in the Western world. These two scenes aren’t accidental in The Mummy.

When certain characters are recurring through literature and film, when they captivate our imaginations so thoroughly, it’s incumbent upon us, as the audience, to understand why they exist and how we might subvert, reinterpret, or recreate them responsibly. Evy occupies a liminal space within an archetype whose roots reach back thousands of years in the Western imagination, and it is Weisz alone with her masterful performance who saves Evy from being maligned by detractors, or worse, forgotten. It is Weisz alone who keeps the character from becoming a racist trope. Here is the history that made Hollywood comfortable in giving us the image of an orientalized Evelyn, an Evelyn who uses her sexuality to a certain end, and how Weisz ultimately protects the character from the patriarchy.

The male Christian imagination is responsible for how the world looks today under patriarchy — it steers the flow of much of the Western world’s major narratives. This imagination feeds the male gaze in cinema, assigning meaning to women under its purview based on their relation to the subject: the white, Christian man. Guiding archetypes are learned from various foundational texts, such as the Bible, which means that if we want to understand some of our beloved characters, we must turn to Jesus.

In the stories we tell, there are archetypes that are personified by specific characters and that determine characters’ fates. Think Harry Potter or Star Wars, classic stories of good versus evil with good characters always accompanied by a bad corollary or foil. According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, society’s collective imagination comes pre-furnished with archetypes (inherited from and informed by ancestral experience), and a single archetype will always have a positive and a negative aspect. What this means is that the stories we hear in society help us learn extant archetypes, which we then use in the stories we create. A story that an overwhelming portion of Western society hears is the Christian narrative. This narrative, by putting archetypes such as the Self (Hero), the Helper, the Wise Old Man, etc., in action, facilitates understanding of the types’ function and provides a framework through which people can understand the world around them, meaning that it becomes possible for people to use these types in their own stories. But the Christian narrative has contextual biases: Jesus is a man, though he personifies the archetype of the Self, the male mind is valued above all in this narrative. The negative of the Self, its Shadow, is the antagonist.

When a female character personifies the archetype of the Self when she is the hero of a tale, she is (in the male Christian imagination, Christian narratives, and in Christian mythology) Mary-like, and her Shadow, or negative, is Eve. Here is where things get grim. In his book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination, scholar Leonid Livak talks about how Western narratives (theology, philosophy, fiction) increasingly came to rely on the figure of “the jew” as an Other, one who serves as an ideological scapegoat (receptacle of displaced guilt, anxieties, and fears), and also a historical scapegoat (for example, in apostolic writings, “the jews” became increasingly blamed for wanting Jesus to be crucified because the Romans couldn’t be faulted as they were in power; Christianity, being the young religion it was, wanted on the good side of the rulers), along with serving as proof of Christianity’s existential need and veracity. This figure of “the jew” is wholly made up — hence why Livak puts the term in quotations — and has nothing to do with Jewish peoples, though it certainly had and continues to have real-world, racist consequences. It is because of the role of “the jews” in Christian mythology that Eve is Mary’s Shadow. Another iteration of this duality is the Madonna/Whore dichotomy dictating the roles women can occupy in most Western narratives.

It’s easy to understand why, by Christian logic, Eve is a negative figure. In the Bible, Eve eats the apple and brings on the loss of paradise — she is, by association, carnal, sensual, and selfish. She is fallen from grace and therefore earthly (as opposed to lofty/heavenly), and so allied with “the jews,” who according to the Christian narrative, want to destroy Christendom and are responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. According to Christian ideology, Judaism is the “old” religion, meaning that “the jews” are depicted in narratives through a language of obsolescence. Livak says they are depicted as “undead among the living,” distinguishable by physical characteristics, such as yellow/pale skin or diseases (leprosy, tuberculosis), which serve as a physical marker for the mythological/ideological role they played in Jesus’ crucifixion and as practitioners of an “old” religion. As Christian peoples came to interact with the Islamic world, the language of difference expanded to make sense of this new Other, it began encompassing Muslim peoples within the character of “the jews.” “The jews” increasingly came to wear “Oriental” dress (this image reaches its apotheosis in the nineteenth century), such as turbans, and came to look like Middle Easterners. In the nineteenth century, Eve figures came to have dark hair and wear gauzy clothes covering their pale, tubercular skin. The Eve figure becomes a vampire, sapping metaphorically or literally the virility of good, productive Christian men. As with all misogynistic and racist characters, this vampy woman is a threat to the state, to Christendom, because she owns her sexuality, wresting it from the control of Christian men who are vulnerable because they want to have sex with her.

HOW EVY FITS THE TROPE AND HOW RACHEL WEISZ ESCAPES IT

Evy’s fictional adventure in The Mummy follows on the heels of silent film star Theda Bara’s (1885-1955) historical success. The Cincinnati-born, Jewish Bara was presented to American audiences by the head of Fox Film Company William Fox and his press agents as an “exotic” femme fatale, she portrayed vampiric characters who seduced virile men. The persona Fox created for Bara came with a backstory that told audiences her name was an anagram for “Arab Death,” and that she was born in the “shadow of the Sphinx” to a French artist’s Arabian mistress.

In The Mummy, Evy is the daughter of a famed explorer (her last name is a reference to George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who backed the excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1907, and who had a daughter named Evelyn) and an Egyptian mother who was an adventurer, whom Evy’s father married because he loved Egypt so much. It’s difficult not to draw the comparison between Evy’s birth and Bara’s publicized origin story — both born in the shadow of the Sphinx. Evy contains both the Madonna and the Eve types within her — this is what makes her relatable, what makes her such an intriguing and powerful character. Aspects of the Eve type within Evy that are most conspicuous are her otherworldly knowledge, her sexual forwardness, and her physical appearance.

Evy’s knowledge is galling in the best way. She is constantly challenging herself as she racks her brain to solve the curse and delights in showing off her intellect — she calls Beni an idiot when he makes a mistake in translating the O’Connell party’s doomed fate. Time and again, Evy shows us not only that she is to be trusted when it comes to knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history, but also that the Bembridge scholars made a grave mistake in declining her application due simply to a lack of field experience. Accordingly, the movie has her gaining earthly experience. Her introduction to the world of her contemporary brutish men, which is facilitated first by O’Connell and then by the Americans and Imhotep, leads to a kind of powerful savviness that we see when Evy kisses Imhotep. The knowledge she possesses is reminiscent of the biblical Eve, in that Evy’s mind is what awakens the curse that is meant to doom mankind, but the experience she gains is what helps her to save the world. Her knowledge is simultaneously lofty and very much of this earth.

Her sexual forwardness is also refreshing, despite being mired as it is in the negative Eve archetype. Evy knows what she wants, sexually, evident when she drunkenly says to O’Connell that she is going to kiss him. But the most intriguing aspect of her control over her own sexuality is certainly the Imhotep kiss. In an earlier version of the script, Sommers had Imhotep kissing Evy after causing O’Connell’s plane to crash in the sandstorm. But in the movie, we get Evy kissing Imhotep in such a determined and forward way that it’s shocking, but also in line with her development: Evy knows the hold she has over Imhotep, in the way that Jasmine knew the hold she had over Jafar. Certainly, Evy kisses Imhotep as a means to a morally good end, but the fact that the movie even has her kissing the bad guy, using her body to gain something, is certainly an example of the femme fatale who is an instantiation of the Eve type. In 1999, Evy’s sexual confidence could have been symptomatic of ‘90s feminism, but seeing it transplanted to the 1920s, enacted by a character who is introduced to us as a “prudish nightmare” is telling, a testament to the ideology-soaked minds of the people who produced this movie. It is not the English side of Evy who kisses Imhotep, it is the Egyptian side, the femme fatale, which is also the side that wears the sexy, orientalized outfit with confidence.

When Evy emerges from the throng of veiled women, she looks like a Charles Landelle painting. No other Egyptian woman on screen around her is dressed in an outfit like hers, except for the women at the bar in Cairo who would be sex workers or escorts, dressed in the West’s orientalized wet dream of the Middle East. The reason why Evy’s character interests me is that she is half-Egyptian and half-English, but the filmmakers never put her in clothes an Egyptian woman in a village would wear — the clothes she wears at the beginning of the movie are more in line with what Egyptian women in cities would have worn. Weisz herself is of Jewish descent, making her portrayal of the half-Egyptian Evy all the more complex, all the more mired in the image of “the jew” because of how the capitalist system that is Hollywood is comfortable in portraying Weisz as Evy.

Sommers describes Evy as a “meek librarian” who ends up becoming a dashing adventuress by the film’s end, but he doesn’t seem to fully understand the character he wrote, perhaps because of how much Weisz added to it because of her heritage but also by virtue of her prowess as an actress, which is ultimately why Evy is so beloved. In other words, we can still love the Evy that Hollywood gives us, the Evy painted in the image of Theda Bara, in Eve. Nothing about Evy, from the moment we’re introduced to her, is meek. Recall the way she stands tall as she lists her accomplishments to the library’s curator. “You put up with me because I can read and write Ancient Egyptian, decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic, and I’m the only person within a thousand miles who knows how to properly code and catalogue this library,” she says with immense confidence and pride, which is evident when near the movie’s end she exclaims, “Take that, Bembridge scholars!” From beginning to end, every one of her actions is self-assured. Critic MaryAnn Johanson was correct when she said “Evelyn and Rick are basically Indiana Jones split down the middle — she’s the brains, he’s the brawn.” If O’Connell is determined when it comes to doing whatever it takes to satisfy what he has been contracted to do, then Evy is steadfast in doing whatever it takes to acquire whatever artifact or bit of knowledge she needs to satisfy her historian’s brain and ultimately save humankind. She does become more brazen and strong as she learns new physical skills, but her kind heart and her love for learning are an integral part of the Evy we are initially introduced to.

Though Evy’s character development is written in the script, there is much that Weisz gives to Evy that’s all her own. Evy’s curiosity, which has her running her hands over the ammunition that O’Connell rolls out before her, and how she beams when she talks about the Book of Amun-Ra — this is all Weisz. The upturn of her lips, the arch of her brows, the way she narrows her eyes when she knows that whatever bit of history she’s teaching O’Connell and Jonathan is delicious; the way she isn’t afraid to get in the sand and scurry about on her hands and knees as she opens the Book of the Dead — this is all added by Weisz. This is Weisz’s gutsy and endearing screen presence, the charm that had her initially cast. Weisz gives Evy pluck, but she also gives her a jaw-dropping beauty.

Evy is saved by the English blood in her, that of her explorer father, who would have given her access to the education that saves everyone else in the movie. The reason why Evy’s fate is not that of a femme fatale is that she has scholastic knowledge first, and worldly knowledge second. She escapes becoming Anck-Su-Namun, in other words. Though Evy is the main character audiences are meant to love, she has all the dressings of a femme fatale who traditionally meets a tragic end, who traditionally owns her sexuality, is pale, and has dark hair. The paradox of Weisz’s Evy is that no blonde actress could have ever played Evy; not before 1999 and not after. Weisz is responsible for the exuberant Evy we get on screen. This is a character who is confident as any femme fatale, knows her purpose, but is also clumsy, endearing, indelible, adorable, and stunning. Weisz makes Evy hers entirely. It’s small touches: the smirks, the joy she takes in hurting bad men and in knowing she is smarter than all the men around her, in knowing that she has sexual power over these men.

At the end of the day, what we love Evy stems from Weisz’s amazing performance. The sexist and racist history that informs much of the Evy Carnahan we see on screen has, paradoxically, given many women a kind of women to look up to — not for the weird fetishistic reasons that determine her dress, but rather because she is the most textured female character in all of The Mummy. And who doesn’t love a mummy-killing femme fatale?

By Kaveh Jalinous

This Essay was originally published May 12, 20022. This post is part of our “Greatest Hits “ where we re-share prior pieces that are worth reading no matter the year.

A thirteen-year-old girl who spontaneously combusts into a giant red panda. An aging laundromat owner who discovers the various dimensions of an infinite multiverse. The concepts behind the former, the animated Pixar film Turning Red, and the latter, the live-action A24 film Everything Everywhere All at Once are worlds apart. Other than the obvious overlap of Asian personal and cultural representation, the films’ styles, scopes and audiences are wildly divergent — at least at first glance.

The real connection between Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once is how they both depict pressure of parental expectations, albeit from very different perspectives. We come into this world as reliant beings who, without the care of our parents, wouldn’t survive, so it makes sense that we follow their guidance. As we grow up, however, a gradual shift often occurs: we discover our place in society, and start gaining a sense of independence. With this, we realize the ways in which we differ from our parents. From these realizations, sometimes a rift develops between what our parents expect from us, and what we want for ourselves. It is at this point that parental expectations transition into parental pressures. This exact moment is what Turning Red and Everything Everywhere successfully capture.

Meilin Lee is Turning Red’s protagonist, voiced by Rosalie Chiang. She’s an outgoing teenager, and also strives for perfection in every aspect of her life, both to please her own ambitions and those of her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). Her days revolve around earning perfect grades, her tight-knit friend group, and her undying love for 4*TOWN — a popular boy band in 2002, the year the film is set. Her nights are spent helping her mother at her family’s temple. She applies her confident attitude toward this job, considering it another “to-do” in her well-balanced and long list of tasks.

In contrast, there’s Everything Everywhere All at Once’s 20-something-year-old Joy (Stephanie Hsu). She struggles to connect with her mother Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), and often can’t carry on a conversation with her. Their exchanges are mainly composed of grating insults, extended silences, and a growing feeling of alienation from one another. Joy’s crippling insecurity and pain at her mother not accepting her girlfriend, Becky, inhibits her from connecting with her mother. Her seeming timidity and lack of confidence is why it’s baffling, particularly at the start of the film, that the antagonist of Everything Everywhere All at Once, is, ultimately, Joy.

Well, sort of. The antagonist Joy is also known as Jobu Tapaki, an all-powerful version of her from an alternate universe who has the ability to jump between universes. Because Jobu is subjected to so many expectations from the Alpha-Verse’s version of Evelyn who pushes her to use her powers, she can harness any reality she wants using only her mind. Evelyn’s primary becomes to stop Jobu’s master plan to escape these expectations via destruction, which, if successful, would destroy every universe.

The stakes may be different, but both films revolve around a battle between mother and daughter.

Meilin’s transition into a red panda ignites the divide between her and her mother, Ming. A metaphor for both her menstrual cycle and puberty, it is only after this event occurs that she starts taking risks and going against the overwhelming number of expectations that Ming has laid out for her. She goes through stereotypical teenager behaviors, including lashing out and lying to her parents, slacking off in school, and spending all of her free time with her friends. These actions lead to further tensions, as Ming tries to interject her presence in all aspects of Meilin’s life. She bars Meilin from letting her panda out, spending too much time with her friends, and, most horrifyingly, from attending the 4*TOWN concert coming up. There is a key similarity driving both of their actions, though. Regardless of what she is doing, Meilin is always conscious of her mother’s looming presence, constantly worried that her journey of self-discovery will divide the two of them forever. Unbeknownst to her, Ming feels the same way, afraid that she will lose her daughter. Neither of them can voice their opinions to one another.

For Meilin, every step she takes toward forging her own identity is accompanied by the worry that whoever she becomes will not satisfy Ming. This is amplified because of the sacrifices Ming has made in order to give Meilin every opportunity. What Ming doesn’t realize is that by constantly forcing herself into Meilin’s ventures, she is making her expectations for her daughter to succeed feel more like pressure to conform. Because neither character takes the time to voice their anxieties, they begin to drift further apart — despite their love for one another.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, we never actually see the backstory of Jobu cracking under the weight of her mother’s expectations as she is pushed too far. We only see the result. Because she was never granted the space to develop her own identity, Jobu has none. This explains her dissatisfaction with life and her overwhelming desire for anyone to understand, and relate to, the struggle that she is going through. The character is a manifestation of what Joy will become if her strained relationship with Evelyn continues its current trajectory.

Through this, Everything Everywhere All at Once introduces another issue that drives parental expectations: individualism. At the beginning of the film, Evelyn is convinced that her struggles are hers and hers alone. Whenever she talks to Joy, she disregards her daughter’s feelings, sending her into fits of sadness and anger. As she discovers the multiverse, Evelyn is forced to come to terms with the fact that she isn’t the center of any universe. This transition allows her to finally see Joy as a real human being, someone constantly shaped by the thoughts, opinions, and insults that she, as her mother, doles out.

Neither film suggests that parents should view themselves on the same level as their kids. Instead, both films state that parental expectations come about when parents see their children as extensions of themselves, rather than as independent beings.

Ming’s and Evelyn’s struggles to treat their children as independent beings aren’t entirely their fault. The plots of both films place a very strong emphasis on the role of the extended family. One of the most enjoyable gags in Turning Red involves Meilin’s grandmother and aunties bursting through the temple’s door to help her deal with turning into a panda. Similarly, a repeated motif in Everything Everywhere is Evelyn tiring herself and her family out to cater to her father’s every need, hoping to avoid his judgements. When Ming and Evelyn are forced to deal with their parents face-to-face, they assume a similar role to their children, constantly worrying that their parents are disappointed in them.

Cultural factors play a significant role in parental expectations. In Turning Red, Ming imparts the traditions to Meilin, specifically, honoring her ancestors, respecting her parents, and following tradition. In her journey of self-discovery, Meilin never goes against these three mantras. She constructs her identity around both tradition and modernity. She spends time with her family and her friends. She watches Cantonese soap operas with her mother and goes head-over-heels for the boy band commercial breaks.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn’s attempts at imparting wisdom to her daughter fall flat as their relationship is too fraught with tension for Joy to take anything away. Evelyn realizes that to truly repair the cracks in her and Joy’s relationship, she must abandon everything that she knows.

The root of parental pressure in both films, and a core element of their climactic sequences, is fear. Meilin fears that becoming her own person will divide her and Ming forever. Joy fears that she and Evelyn are too different to ever connect. Ming and Evelyn respond in similar ways. Ming tells Meilin that, “The farther you go, the prouder I’ll be.” Evelyn tells Joy that even though every alternate reality awaits, she “will always want to be here with you.” Their statements are simple, but there’s a reason their lines are so powerful. For the first time in the films, we feel like mother and daughter truly understand one another. And there’s something quite beautiful in that.

For as long as I have been conscious, Markiplier (real name Mark Fischbach) lived on the phone screen of my best friend. Our walks around our idyllic, grass-laden middle school during the perpetually hot Floridian (insert literally any season here) were soundtracked to the famous “My name’s Markiplier” introduction to his YouTube videos and girlish screams. See, Natalie and I created a friendship of both being “othered”: we bonded on the first day of middle school over loving the Beatles, having lunchboxes, and my undying obsession with Disney Channel Original Movie Teen Beach Movie. At 13, we would huddle up in our school cafeteria, her phone set up on her lunchbox, and share earbuds as we watched Fischbach conquer the new game of the day.

In our adult life, this has grown into the most mutually encouraging, optimistic, and honest friendship I’ve ever had. Now, as we’ve been in a long-distance bestieship for the past four years, I’ve been missing her like a hole in my heart, so I wanted to learn more about what she loves, which led to my turning on Markiplier’s YouTube videos whenever I felt lonely. I never imagined that the silly man on my best friend’s phone (and lockscreen) would someday be capable of dominating box offices through an impressive grassroots campaign that has quietly revolutionized the way we think about film distribution and audiences’ interaction with movies.

Fischbach first played the “Iron Lung” video game back in May 2022. His affinity for the project was evident: I’ve come to learn you can tell when Fischbach loves a game when you see him getting quieter and more contemplative while playing, commenting on the ideas presented to him rather than just nitpicking the mechanics or cracking larger-than-life jokes (I shamelessly recommend his play-through of “Slay the Princess” for the magnificent off-the-cuff commentary on existentialism). The “Iron Lung” game takes place in a dystopian world after an event called “The Quiet Rapture,” in which planets and stars have begun disappearing one by one. You play as a part of the survivalist group from the space station Eden, which was captured by rival group Consolidation of Iron (COI). No reasons for your imprisonment are given, but your sentence (which you play through) involves being welded into a submarine and made to search for falling stars through an ocean of blood, in the hopes of being able to conduct tests that will assist in humanity’s restabilization.

For those in the know, Fischbach’s interest in this game is lovingly ironic: one of his lifelong interests has been space and the vast mystery of it, while one of his biggest fears has been the ocean. For his debut film undertaking to be one that touches on his deepest fear and his greatest love is poignant.

It came as no real surprise — more of an exciting shockwave — when, in April 2023, Fischbach announced that he had purchased the rights to the “Iron Lung” game and narrative. Working with the game’s developer David Szymanski to bring the film to life, Fischbach would serve as writer, director, producer, and star in the adaptation. In the announcement, Fischbach consistently emphasized he would make sure that this adaptation, unlike so many before it, would be a true adaptation — not a copy, not a completely different IP, but the true reinvention for the big screen that the game deserved. At each stage of creative development, Szymanski was present: the two collaborated heavily on the screenplay, production design, and on-set touches, with Szymanski even making a small cameo in the big-screen adaptation of the game he so lovingly developed.

The results of this painstaking work is 2026’s Iron Lung. As a film, it’s gritty, intimate, and gruesomely thrilling. The film builds on the game’s Player character lore by expanding them into a main character: Simon (Fischbach), a spy from Eden who has been captured by COI after a mission gone wrong, and is now imprisoned in the Iron Lung submarine on a reconnaissance mission to find anything in the blood ocean that can improve humanity. The thriller is effective, and Fischbach compellingly plays Simon’s hardness balanced with the attitude of a man desperate to survive despite his faults. Simon frantically attempts to survive in a submarine slowly running out of oxygen, all while encountering blood splatters that are covered up as mere ocean condensation and beginning to hear a voice over the disconnected intercom.

Iron Lung is evocative of Arrival in the way it builds a narrative around simmering suspense. Simon exists both within a submarine that’s falling apart around him and the real in-universe reality of humanity decaying after “The Quiet Rapture,” a fact expressed in Simon’s physicality the more he stays in the submarine. While the constraint of being set completely within a very dimly lit (hinderingly so, at many times) location only allows Fischbach to do so much with his performance, he balances the tenderness of a man begging a voice that may or may not be in his head to just keep talking to him with the compelling anguish of a man outraged, demanding to know how the group directing his penance could send him down to die and not even know his name. The relationship we get to have with Simon is deeply intimate and gruesome, as his own relationship with himself oscillates violently from disgust to hatred to begrudging acceptance, the reality around him becoming more and more warped. His conscience — which may or may not also be a horrific creature that lurks in the ocean of blood — takes the voice of the woman overseeing his mission, albeit with a different accent. As an adaptation of source material, and as an entry into the oft-stereotyped and cringe-inducing genre of “video game movies”, I find Iron Lung to be an artistic feat that is more aligned with TV’s critically acclaimed The Last of Us.

Since Fischbach secured the rights to “Iron Lung,” he was free to self-produce, direct, star, and write with no intervention from a studio giant. The promotional campaign for the film did not take place on the likes of a Hot Ones chair or BuzzFeed puppy interview, but where Fischbach’s fanbase is most alive: social media. After his experience with producing and starring in limited series Edge of Sleep for Amazon Prime Video — an entertaining entry into science fiction that was sadly not promoted by the streaming giant (to the point it wasn’t even featured on the press website and quietly moved to Tubi after a few months) — one could sense a distrust, or rather an apprehension in Fischbach to interact with “mainstream” media sources, outlets, or routes. Taking into consideration that the project was self-funded, the majority of Iron Lung‘s promotion took place on the social media accounts of the cast and crew, including, of course, Markiplier’s social media accounts. The film’s trailer was seen by millions of people in just a few days, with fans emailing their local cinemas to ask them to show Iron Lung on opening weekend. This resulted in an unprecedented amount of interest, and the roll-out — which originally targeted around 60 theaters nationally — ended up including more than 4100 theaters internationally.

Fans’ demand for a figure so universally beloved by the online generation (Fischbach sits comfortably in the internet hall of fame of YouTubers who “raised” Gen Z, including Tyler Oakley, Jacksepticeye, MattPatt, Zoella, and Dan and Phil) shows the power Gen Z has as an educated, avid, passionate consumer of media — as well as consumers’ desire to go outside of the home and seek communion in community at the cinema. Iron Lung went so far as to become the box office king, sitting at number one at the domestic box office for the first Friday and Saturday of its release against heavyweights and awards-baiters like Zootopia 2 and Send Help. All of this is astounding and unprecedented for a completely independent release, and taking into account the numbers only makes it more so: Iron Lung cost approximately $4 million to make. Dominating the box office through independent means, the movie grossed an overwhelming $21 million globally in its opening week. It is inconceivable for an independently made, non-traditionally promoted film to recuperate seven times its original budget within its first week, so, in light of its unprecedented success — and as a thank you to the cast and crew — Fischbach paid a bonus of the amount of their original salary in a profit-sharing agreement that shows the importance of supporting indie cinema.

The numbers and public support prove it: what Fischbach has managed to accomplish with his debut independent film is precedent-setting. Iron Lung delivered cinematically despite not being the corporate ideal of what a video game movie can be — instead, it was made with sweat, grit, and indie artistry, and cultivated and encouraged a fanbase that loves rabidly and unconditionally, Fischbach has shown studios that threaten to replace human ingenuity with AI and insist on feeding us movies with lobotomy-levels of nuance that there are financial gains to be had from passion projects made with an indie ethos and deep love for the subject matter. Never has the disconnect between what studios think we want and what we actually want been clearer: it is always by artists, for artists, and in the spirit of passion.

Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary, The Perfect Neighbor is a film made out of unbridled necessity. The film tells the story of the murder of Ajike Owens at the hands of her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, which occurred in Ocala, Florida, and triggered national debate over racial discrimination and gun violence.

Over several months, a neighborhood dispute is taken too far by Lorincz, including a blatantly racist name-calling (what the children in the case refer to as the b-word, the p-word, and the n-word, going so far as to explain that Lorincz would routinely call them “little slaves”). Lorincz’s unproven claims that her neighbor’s children were attempting to break into her car and rob her formed a part of this one-sided tirade, with Lorincz harassing the children by videotaping them. The culmination occurred on June 2nd, 2023, when Lorincz fatally shot through a door, killing Owens, claiming she was in fear for her life. As police reveal during her questioning, however, her original call of complaint about a disturbance with the children, and then the call she made to say she had shot through the door and killed someone, were made exactly two minutes apart. She knew that officers were on their way to respond to the scene, and still made a knee-jerk reaction towards execution-style violence.

To tell this story with unflinching truth and the utmost care, director Geeta Gandbhir made the decision to use 911 call logs (in chronological order) and body cam footage in an effort to subvert a form often used to surveil and bring harm to communities of color. We see it all, from Lorincz’s first complaint about a noise disturbance to the trivial and obviously fabricated stories about children with a vendetta against her (they dared to play outside in the grass near her front door), and ultimately to the multiple 911 calls made the night of Owens’s death. Already a storied documentarian, Gandbhir went to Ocala to film and talk to those involved herself because her sister-in-law was best friends with Ajike Owens, and she feared that the local authorities and general media coverage would write the case off as an example of Florida’s infamous “stand your ground” laws.

To me, the most powerful part of any case involving a death is the shocking horror of the grief of those close to the victim. One of the most haunting visuals I’ve ever seen in a documentary is the body cam footage from the night Ajike Owens died: as the officer pulls their car up to the neighborhood, their body camera glimpses the group of adults and children alike who have run out into the dark, oak-laden Florida street in the dead of night and are jumping and screaming and pointing to where Owens is lying unconscious, receiving CPR from a neighbor. You watch her children become actively traumatized; they were the first ones to wander out of their house after hearing the gunshots and face the horrific indignity of Lorincz leaving Owens’ body there, her kids needing help to drag her across the street for care.

The neighbors — renters from all walks of life — band together. This is the Southern spirit: the idea of being kind even when you can’t be nice. They sweep in and take in Owens’s children as they panic and beg the officer to just let them see their mom move. The officer eventually has to break the news of her death to their father, who then enlists the officers’ assistance in breaking the news to his children. Raw grief in real, unflinching, unedited time. To not be interrupted by an infographic, talking head, or statistic once, and to have to force yourself to be a present spectator to the visceral carnage of the loss of Owens is deeply effective, and gives agency back to those involved by not misconstruing their pain. Even more so, it lets a part of you hold this family in the still-sudden wake of this immense tragedy.

In Florida, “stand your ground” laws came into effect in 2005. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the law “allows individuals to use lawful force, including deadly force, in self-defense without a duty to retreat if they reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent imminent death, great bodily harm, or a forcible felony. It applies anywhere a person has a legal right to be.” I spent my childhood and adolescence as a resident of Polk County, Florida, located two hours from where Owens’s murder occurred. I was unaware of her case until seeing the documentary, but a sense of kinship with the residents you meet throughout the film felt inevitable for me: jean shorts and tank tops, moms screaming at their kids to come inside at sunset, running free on the patch of sweltering road in front of your house because you’re a kid and your state is so hot it feels like it’s on fire, and the world feels contained to the row of houses you exist in for most of your life.

Central Florida is a place of deep conservatism woven into the fabric of the South: sex was publicly chastised there, and I did not see a pack of condoms in a store until I later moved to Boston. It was obviously occurring, though, my county being 22nd in the state for the highest teen pregnancy rates. Whereas something as normal as sex was a disgusting taboo to never be spoken of outside of the quiet corners of a classroom or park, guns were a point of pride for many people: which kinds, how many, how they hunted. A weapon that could only take life felt more agreeable to vox populi than the consent, safety, and well-being of the women who make life. As the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reports, when looking at US states, there has been an 8–11% increase in homicide-related deaths, which chalks up to roughly 700 more killings a year. A key conclusion the research draws is that “stand your ground” laws, originally enacted to reduce crime rates, have actually increased them. Burglary has not decreased, but gun violence and gun-enacted homicides have grown in communities like the South, which are already deeply disenfranchised enough thanks to gerrymandering.

The terrifying byproduct of “stand your ground” laws is not only the increase in gun ownership and violence, but the encouraged reflex for violence, the narcissistic pride in believing your life matters so much you may kill another just for being “too close,” and the mass desensitization of interpersonal violence. To say that the killing of Owens was senseless would be, to me, to ignore the very ways in which perpetrators of racial violence rationalize their dehumanization and killing. Owens’s death was unjustifiable, disgustingly cruel, dehumanizing — and the product of one woman’s deeply held racism towards not just Owens but the entire group of residents (children included) in her neighborhood.

Ajike Owens seemed magnetic; she had an infectious laugh she passed on to her four kids, and dreams of being able to own a home and manage a local restaurant. I wish more than anything that her children still had their mother around. I wish her friends could call her on days good and bad. And I wish that she could be around to see all the seeds of progress, however slowly germinating, that have been planted in her honor.

The Perfect Neighbor is now streaming on Netflix, with a portion of the film’s licensing fee going to Pamela Dias (Akije Owens’s mother) and Owens’s four children. Dias has gone on to cofound the Standing in the Gap Fund, which is dedicated to advocating against racial violence, for community healing and resilience, and to support the families and communities affected by these laws.

Greetings,

Thank y’all for all of the support so far this year and prior years. Today, we want to announce that we are returning to our zine/Patreon-inspired roots with quarterly issues (5-7 essays). Each issue would be released as a free read, but each essay would be published as soon as it is ready for our paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that after this month, all of our new essays will be behind a paywall. This way, readers have an incentive to donate or subscribe without punishing our overall reader base.

Festival coverage will continue alongside our film recommendation of the day and other features.

Some of our most-read features over the past year came from guest writers, and as the written film criticism declines, we want to be a bastion for diverse and underrepresented voices.

For issue 01, pay will be $120. Issue 02-03 will be $150, and Issue 04 and onward will be $200 based on our paid subscriber base at the time. We are fully committed to at least four issues as a publication. The first issue will be released on June 21st, with a submission deadline of June 1st. The submission page can be found here

Film Daze is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to uplifting the unheard and underrepresented voices of the film community. While both free and paid subscriptions are available, please consider a paid subscription to support our cause and keep us operating. If you like what you read, like and or share, cheers!

In a stuffy English pub, a boy in a goofy barbershop quartet ensemble is wordlessly cruised by a man in biker’s leather, offered only a time and place scrawled on a holiday card. As directed, the boy arrives in the alleyway of their local Primark on Christmas night. Among empty grocery delivery boxes, the boy fumbles through a blowjob (he’s much better at licking the man’s boots) before thanking him for the opportunity. He smiles down at his own muddy knees when he returns to the home he shares with his parents.

I was so excited, so explicitly moved, after watching Harry Lighton’s Pillion for the first time that I couldn’t sleep. Pillion’s protagonist, Colin (Henry Melling), is a young gay man from an incredibly supportive family. His aforementioned barbershop quartet is populated by himself, his father, and his brothers. His mother is doting. Even as she battles cancer, she attends her family’s pub performances and sets her son up on dates with local boys. She’s even able to spin Colin’s trip out to meet the biker from the bar into something romantic and not gritty, happily sending him on his way after their holiday dinner.

If Colin and his family are like something out of an Aardman animation — kind, loving, endlessly accepting modern British working-class folk who put a positive spin on just about everything — then biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) is sprung from a Tom of Finland drawing. He’s imposingly tall, strong, and sharp, pristinely dressed in motorcycle leathers, and constantly trailed by a massive Rottweiler named Rosie. Ray is the perfect dominant fetish object: he speaks very little and very plainly, is shockingly attractive, takes what he pleases, and makes Colin feel both degraded and desirable.

As Colin and Ray embark on their dominant and submissive arrangement, Ray’s demands often evoke an expression of beatific pleasure on Colin’s face. If sexual pleasure is one of the last frontiers that we can access, provide, and enjoy without cost, then I’d say the proclivity for and subsequent successful acting out of anything under the multi-tiered umbrella of BDSM is one of our only free and self-creating, mind-altering substances. In Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem (the short novel from which Pillion is adapted), Colin’s first sexual interaction with Ray begins when Ray clicks his fingers wordlessly to demand a blowjob from Colin. Colin says:

“The second click of his fingers resounded in a space that was not around us. It resounded inside my head. I felt as if he had clicked his fingers in the deepest part of my thinking, producing a brain event like the one that triggers a fit.”

The pleasure that Colin and Ray are able to derive from each other is strictly outlined and, in many senses, uncomplicated. The “rules” are so simple as to never be laid out as anything contractual or listed, but learned through feel or Ray’s singular command. Colin is to cook dinner, Colin is to sleep on the floor, Colin is to complete the list of tasks that Ray leaves out for him by the alarm clock, Colin is to leave the house and fill his time when Ray is out during the workday. It is not a relationship, but instead an “arrangement.”

In return, Colin “gets” things, yes, like a chance to wrestle with Ray, be claimed by him under a collared lock and key, and to be fitted for his own leather biking gear as he rides pillion to Ray. These are extras, though. Most important is the fact that Colin gets to serve Ray. That service and submission are the pleasure.

What I love about Pillion is that it shows a lived-in BDSM dynamic that is entirely feasible without fanfare. For those who have yearned or fantasized about trialing the lifestyle but have been fed a diet of inaccessible or complex kink instructions, the dynamic in Pillion includes a tangible example of things you could maybe try, or ask for; all you need is an egg for an omelet or a floor to sleep on. The way that Colin and Ray live in their dynamic only really requires their shared mental understanding of the dynamic and some practice of ritual.

Pillion is striking in its representation of a BDSM that uplifts the heady act of submission and service itself, highlighting the vulnerability in an act such as sleeping on the floor or kissing a boot. I believe that moments like these in Pillion can appear “small” when we compare them with other, more dramatic cultural understandings of BDSM. I think BDSM can — even after a decade of full-force (and sometimes imperfect) sex positivity and various BuzzFeed and Jezebel-esque essays on why having a kink is just fine — still evoke the mental image in civilian lifestyle of a dominatrix performing complex whip maneuvers in a chain-laden dungeon. While this is obviously an option (hooray!), I think some of this cultural understanding, undeniably for the worse, comes from the Fifty Shades of Grey series.

Writing about the pitfalls of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2026 feels a little bit like trying to pitch a threesome story to Jezebel. We have not just been there, we have been there seven billion times. There is perhaps very little need to return to this space. But I feel that, if Pillion showcases everything I love about BDSM as a practice and BDSM’s capacity to be portrayed in film — its understanding of the heady feelings submission and dominance can evoke, the spiritual gifts it can give to people who are perhaps flawed or wounded but feel held in their BDSM practice — then Fifty Shades of Grey is its dark-sided counterpart.

I am not going to say that Fifty Shades of Grey is bad because of a lack of correct BDSM ethical practice or “representation.” If I tried to critique it by whether or not what happened in it was good kink practice, I would have to throw most of my favorite art about BDSM under the bus as well.

Rather, Fifty Shades of Grey sucks so bad because it isn’t even about BDSM. College-student-turned-book-publisher Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) are not drawn together by any shared desire to partake in sadomasochism or submission and domination. In fact, for most of the series, Anastasia is repulsed by Christian’s desire to partake in any form of BDSM with her. The duo go through a long, complex flirtation period where Christian courts her not as a romantic or sexual partner but as a submissive — in this interpretation, someone who signs an in-depth contract and is given a separate bedroom in his house.

Christian’s debauchery takes place mostly in his “red room,” a dark, silky, leathery place where he goes to enact sadistic urges with his submissive. The red room is a space of useless excess. The various impact implements that line the walls of the red room often repeat themselves: the exact same toys lined up next to each other, same color and same design.

Both Anastasia’s “kept woman” room and Christian’s needlessly inventoried “red room” are shining examples of Fifty Shades‘ actual biggest fantasy: that of being a kept woman in order to remove yourself from any financial constraints. Fifty Shades is a capitalist fantasy. Anastasia is disgusted by and saddened over Christian’s actual internal desires, though she can sometimes derive pleasure from a fancy silk blindfold or a flogger. The only time BDSM is appropriate or of interest in Fifty Shades is when it involves the showing off or utilization of a purchasable sexual item. (Their most traumatic sexual foray occurs when Christian flogs Anastasia with his own leather belt — perhaps the only object that Ray and Christian would share.)

Both Christian and Anastasia see his proclivity for sadism as a character failing, something shocking and grotesque. His desire to spank Anastasia is the Phantom’s facial disfigurement, the Beast’s hairy, toothy form — and, indeed, because Fifty Shades was originally a Twilight fanfiction, Edward Cullen’s insatiable bloodlust.

I feel a little silly writing about Fifty Shades in conversation with Pillion, as the cinematic world of BDSM is so much richer and deeper than these two films. But I think there’s something to be said for the way that Pillion feels like an antidote to whatever culturally allowed for Fifty Shades to become a billion-dollar phenomenon.

Fifty Shades and Pillion are both movies centralized around repeated acts of sadomasochism and a dom/sub dynamic. In Fifty Shades, these repeated arcs of blindfolding-to-spanking-to-missionary occur because this is all that can be imagined. Any act of BDSM has to either be somewhat unpleasant for Anastasia, shameful for Christian, or surprise them both by being mostly okay (and these “mostly okay” interactions almost always spiritually have a “sponsored by Adam & Eve” snipe attached). In contrast, Colin and Ray’s strict and simple regimentation allows for a spaciousness of self. Colin submits so that he is liberated from obsessing over his sense of self: all he has to do right now, at each moment, is the thing Ray has told him to do (“In a strange way, he freed my choices, though he seemed to take them away,” Colin muses internally in Box Hill). In Fifty Shades, the only good part about BDSM is that it allows you to accumulate a lot of stuff: the same paddle three times, the same three fox-tail butt plugs. In Pillion, the practice is the pleasure, and the camping trips and parading through town in new leather gear are for the sake of adding a textural experience to the dynamic (or, equally important, maintaining a like-minded community, as Colin and Ray do these things with fellow leather bikers). The collar and biking leather Colin is gifted carry immense weight because of their submissive representation, not because they are nice things.

Fifty Shades is also obsessed with the birthplace of Christian’s “wound” — whatever it is exactly that is causing him to act sadistically. Christian is, in his own poetic words, “fifty shades of fucked up.” In the rare moments in which Fifty Shades is about BDSM, it’s about two vague sketches of “people” who are tasked with deciding between either “fixing” or gritting through one party’s sadistic sexual proclivities.

Christian’s mother was a sex worker who died of a drug overdose, and every woman that he takes under his sexual contract looks a little like her. This is gnarly, yes, but I find tidy social explanations of why people like the things they do sexually to be both boring and reductive. Sometimes there is a birthplace for our fetishistic attachments, an easy Freudian one-to-one. Sometimes people are into something just because. Most likely, the proclivity is born somewhere in between these spaces. I don’t find any of these narrative arcs particularly valuable, because I think — not to sound, once again, like every sex-positive digital publication of the 2010s — that acts and fantasies that derive sexual pleasure (and are consensual) do not need to be intervened upon, or even parsed apart. I think that BDSM likely does attract people who are wounded, desiring stability, or insecure. And I think it’s really nice for anyone to find something that makes them feel good. What makes Ray and Colin perhaps struggle in the rest of the world — Ray’s icy precision, Colin’s “aptitude for devotion” and somewhat sheltered simplicity — is what makes them thrive in their dynamic.

For Colin and Ray, there are probably emotional catalysts for their respective aptitudes for devotion and chilly rigidity. There are, perhaps, even hints, such as when Ray becomes defensive at the singular dinner he has with Colin’s folks and snaps at Colin’s mother (and maybe, by extension, his own) for trying to judge something that she doesn’t understand.

One of the best, most essential parts of Pillion is that Ray and Colin’s arrangement does not work out. Ray’s capacity to be a dominant is out of a wet dream: he’s chilly, beautiful, direct, a little scary, willing to listen but not guaranteed to agree or concede. Ray seems to have no family, though crucially, he does have community. Colin and Ray’s sexual proclivities do not occur in a vacuum, and Colin is welcomed into a group of like-minded fetish friends. But all of what makes Ray a masturbatory image is also what makes him ultimately incompatible for Colin, who earnestly loves to serve but also earnestly loves to love. He needs not just an “arrangement” but a relationship alongside it. “I’m so happy, but I could be happier,” Colin says when he asks if Ray would be open to introducing one non-dynamic day a week. Ray acts as if he will not offer this, but one wonders more so if he just cannot — if he has created a protective husk that can only be maintained through sterile and specific arrangements.

But while Ray and Colin’s relationship ultimately fractures, the submissive dynamic that Colin becomes attached to (and continues to pursue outside of Ray) is a gift bestowed by Ray. It liberates Colin.

We are sensitive people, socialized in worlds where power structures create endless rules and regulations, and where we are subject to endless structural and interpersonal judgment and limitations regarding our bodies, minds, and desires. It can take very little to feel very vulnerable or very powerful. It can take little to feel like you’ve come undone. It’s scary and it’s exhilarating. I love a fantasy; I even love, when explored lovingly or with actual curiosity, a red room. But most of all, I love to think that we can be unhitched from our own racing mind or internal chatter by sitting at someone’s feet because they said so. Pillion’s ending — Colin, still a little heartbroken, but searching for someone to meet his needs — doesn’t break my heart so much as crack it open. How wonderful it is to allow yourself to be changed, to allow yourself to be overcome by the vulnerability of something like submission.

Extra Geography’s greatest attribute is an outstanding sense of place. When we first meet our main duo, the eccentric and inseparable high schoolers Flic (Marnie Duggan) and Minna (Galaxie Clear), we also meet their all-girls boarding school in Yorkshire. The two traverse with leisurely confidence through sprawling greens, ivy-wrapped teacher’s cottages, and storybook dark wood halls that encase linoleum bathrooms, stickered lockers, and well-equipped science labs; half run of the mill highschool, half a fantasy of British fairytales. The two girls are an undeniable unit, often pressed arm-to-arm as if stitched together, as they, in unison, open their notebooks, snap on matching protective goggles, or scrub their teeth in the girl’s lavatory. There is no need to have a heavy-handed expository line about this film being set in the early 2000s: the clothing, hair accessories, and garish bedspreads tell us exactly where we’re meant to be. Flic and Minna’s world exists in a cozy and compact container, they can easily choose to be each other’s everything because their options are delectably limited. The world that these characters play in is deliciously stylized, providing a skillfully actualized introduction to Flic and Minna’s ecosystem that isn’t tropey or retrod.

Minna and Flic’s unit (and cozy schoolground vessel) seem impossible to unsettle, that is until their school decides to combine their summer play program with the neighboring all-boys school. The boys hijack morning mass with a sanctioned, playful collection of dialogue from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, triggering a Beatlemanic response as the crowd of sixteen year olds scream into their hands.

For Minna, the co-ed play seems like a wonderful option for Flic and her annual “summer project”: an extracurricular, self-made, entirely un-academic scheme that the duo utilize to become more holistically well-rounded for university applications. Flic is less certain; they have decided as a unit to hate boys, for one, and she’d rather a more exciting spiritual project, like falling in love with someone. The girls at first gamely agree to a “both and” situation: the play and falling in love.

Because of the limits of their social enclosure, Flic and Minna select their geography teacher as their potential muse — the bespectacled, frumpy, slightly touchy Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert). Extra Geography does not make this a meditation on sexuality, because that isn’t the point of the summer project. The point is to enact falling in love, to force the butterflies, in order to unlock the essential portion of life.

Despite being a fairly clean, and at moments even innocent film, Extra Geography shares more DNA with Superbad than more try-hard attempts (I’m looking at you, Booksmart) in its “falling in love” storyline. Both films portray adolescence as a time of un-detanglable, inarticulate knot of internal desire meeting an exigent need to follow social scripts, to make regimentation and regulation around something as complex and nebulous as love or sex.

But as Flic and Minna’s interests begin to diverge, Extra Geography begins to lag. Where Flic really does hate boys (whether this is a matter of clinging to youthful cootie fears or a burgeoning queer desire is unclear), Minna is open to introducing them into their lives through the play. Where Minna has been cast as Titania, queen of the fairies, Flic has been cast as the humiliating and vague “Tree/Mound”, a telling comparison of their lived experience as Minna enters real flirtations and Flic enters a cycle of social, romantic, and sexual rejections in situations she doesn’t even really want to be in. In turn, when Flic connects more meaningfully with Miss Delavigne, Minna jealously decides that the “falling in love” summer project isn’t interesting. Their push-and-pull, bicker-and-make-up pattern is repeated one too many times, and save for one genuinely surprising moment regarding Flic and Minna’s attempt to fall in love, Extra Geography falls flat in the third act.

What is wonderful and then ultimately frustrating about Extra Geography is that for two-thirds of the film, it knows exactly what it is. It’s confident and clear in tone and story. But in the final third, the film entirely loses the thread — structurally, energetically, and even, most disappointingly, in understanding the core relationship between Flic and Minna.

It’s more notable when the top students fall short, and Extra Geography suffers from the same curse.

Union County opens with a session of Ohio’s Adult Recovery Court, a legally-mandated program for people in recovery from drug addiction. The first few people we see testify to their slow and steady improvements — jobs, hopes of regaining custody of their kids, celebrations of days, weeks, or months sober. Cody Parsons (Will Poulter) is one of the Adult Recovery Court’s attendees. He’s in a button-up shirt and speaks with a slow, resigned, and solemn tone. When Cody reconnects with his foster brotherJack (Noah Centineo) in Recovery Court, they are both open to the notion of consistent sobriety and on undeniably shaky ground.

Union County understands that this is how recovery goes: it understands addiction as something constant, simultaneously all-consuming and humdrum. It doesn’t disparage or minimize the very real battle that is recovering from the disease. It’s truthful about the tragedy built into addiction without being hopeless. Union Court understands that the systems put in place — socially, culturally, or governmentally — to guide towards recovery are both well-meaning and taxing. In the throes of early sobriety, you often lose access to privacy and become responsible for essential outside administration: keeping track of your meetings, court appearances, paying off your fines, and attending scheduled drug tests. If things slip through the cracks, you are at risk of losing the care you so desperately need.

Union County’s flaw isn’t a lack of realism or a reliance on stereotyping. Union County’s biggest flaw is simply being boring. Even worse, the film shows us in flashes how interesting it could be. The film’s issue isn’t in its conceit: there is something compelling and frequently moving about the hyperrealistic scenes in court or meetings. But this magic comes from director Adam Meeks’ decision to include actual members of Ohio’s Adult Recovery Court in Union County. What makes the film lose its shine — which is provided in abundance by those in recovery performing their own experiences — is the slotting in of a traditional scripted narrative and the artificial performances of the “bigger name” actors.

In comparison to the verisimilitude provided by the members of the Recovery Court, Poulter’s interpretation of someone struggling with addiction feels like a performance. He stands out, and even grates at moments. Poulter has chosen to show Cody’s decision not to relapse as a constant tension in his body, as if physically holding himself back, shrinking inward with a low head and hunched shoulders. His line deliveries are slow and sullen, with his in-meeting monologues sometimes coming across as an attempt at capital-A Acting despite the part requiring something much more naturalistic. (Centineo also suffers from this over-performance, though fortunately Cody’s love interest, Anna — played by Elise Kibler — holds a grounding realism).

There’s something about presenting a “peek behind the curtain” into the processes of recovery from addiction that can feel like it’s ignoring what I feel is an obvious truth: everyone knows someone — probably quite well — that struggles with addiction, in all of its tragedy and banality. A lot of these systems and programs likely aren’t news to any of us. Union County’s side characters present this perspective with such fidelity (obviously, as they actually lived it), such emotional truth, that the addition of actors failing to perform in a manner that is lived-in or interesting feels like an obfuscation of the good stuff. At the edges of Union County is something raw, real, fascinating. Its center — an attempt at a classical narrative indie movie and a collection of performances that are trying too hard in a movie that otherwise is overflowing with naturalism and ease — unfortunately distract and ring untrue.

In positioning white men at the forefront of class struggle, The Long Walk and The Running Man replicate the hegemonic ideals that determine who is allowed to be the face of a movement, and who is relegated to a passive figure who must be saved.

Two releases this year, The Long Walk and The Running Man, share several similarities. Both are adaptations of dystopian Stephen King novels, revolve around physicality as a means of survival, and pose class struggle as a life-or-death fight. Despite the many changes made between book and film adaptation, one major element remains: both films have heroic white male leads. These leads prove their bravery by using the most personal aspect of themselves, their bodies, as a means of resisting oppressive state powers. By centering two white men as harbingers for revolution and saviors to their Black companions, The Long Walk and The Running Man regurgitate the hegemonic standards of heroism that are reinforced in the United States and its cinema.

The Long Walk follows Raymond (Cooper Hoffman), a young man who embarks on the titular quest, a televised contest in which one young man from each state must undergo a days-long walk until only one remains. Raymond was traumatized by his father’s murder on the basis of political subversion, bestowing within him a rage that fuels him to join the race, even as his mother begs him not to. The prize, in the midst of an abysmal economic state, is an abundance of riches and the granting of one wish. Raymond’s undying wish is to murder the Major (Mark Hamill), the walk’s tyrannical overseer who is also responsible for his father’s murder. Over the course of the film, Raymond grows close to the other boys, learning about their personal lives and reasons for walking. Raymond’s closest companion on the journey is Pete (David Jonsson), a charismatic walker with idealist dreams of changing the country through his win.

The Running Man revolves around the eponymous reality show in which a “runner” must survive 30 days of being hunted by skilled assassins for the chance to win billions of dollars. Ben Richards (Glen Powell), a rageful manual laborer and former union activist, enters the competition as a means of providing medication for his sick daughter. From the beginning of his run on the show, Richards emerges as the strongest of the three competitors. With his flippant attitude and ability to kill the hunters, he is transformed into an icon for those who are exploited by the hyper-capitalist United States. By the end of the film, he becomes the face of the country’s class revolution.

In both films, the lead white male characters have intimate relationships with Black people. For Raymond, this comes in the form of his bond with Pete. By the end of the walk, the two men have shared the depths of their life stories and rely heavily on each other for support. Hints at their physical attraction towards each other only deepen this connection. Ben Richard’s ties to Black people are much more developed - in the film’s opening, Ben is introduced holding his biracial daughter, and the audience soon meets his Black wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson). Ben is the head of an interracial family, thereby inextricably linking his fate to that of a Black woman and girl. Further, Ben is taken in by a Black family during his run. He is warmly welcomed by the family, helps to care for their sick child, and is physically protected by them when hunters discover his location.

Despite taking place in a dystopian future in which class struggle is the most prominent societal divider, The Running Man incorporates elements that call to Black culture and the history of Black activism in the United States. As Ben begins his quest to save his family, his heroic walk is accompanied by Sly and the Family Stone’s “Underdog,” establishing an association between him and the reactionary subversion of funk music. Through his journey, Ben moves from one safe house to another, a quasi-Underground Railroad. The film also co-opts the language and actions of anti-police resistance, of which Black Americans have historically been at the forefront. This is most clearly seen when the film features a piece of graffiti reading “AGAB;” instead of cops, the in-universe law enforcement, labeled as “goons,” are decried as collectively bad. Towards the film’s climax, Ben’s heroic actions are accompanied by the Black power classic, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” The Long Walk also references long-held critiques of law enforcement and its mistreatment of “othered” individuals. The flashback of the murder of Raymond’s father establishes a corrupt police state looking for excuses to murder its civilians. Whereas The Running Man sees Ben becoming a singular revolutionary icon, The Long Walk showcases a racially diverse group of walkers. By establishing these men by their class distinction, a race blind society is developed. But despite this supposed indifference towards race, it is still the white men who are established as leaders.

It must be noted, however, that the films vary in how their leads interact with their Black counterparts, with The Long Walk being relatively more subversive. Diverging from the plot of the book, the film sees Pete, not Raymond, win the long walk. However, his win is not entirely on his own merit. Raymond, having become devoted to his new friend, purposefully stops during the walk’s final stretch, thereby handing Pete the win. While it is uplifting for the Black male character to win, his white counterpart is established as responsible for his success. In The Running Man, depictions of Black characters, especially Black women, are flat. Sheila is not a character; she is motivation in human form. Beyond her work as a waitress—which is posed as a gateway to sex work but not further developed—nothing is known about her or what attracts her to Ben. The static nature of her character is emphasized by the way she appears in the film. For the majority of the runtime, she is seen through a photo that Ben carries with him. In this image, she is forever frozen as a mother with no interiority.

Like the books on which they are based, The Long Walk and The Running Man are concerned with the exploitation of oppressed people as spectacle; it is for this reason that the films give way to interrogation of what is deemed acceptable by media executives. In establishing white, able-bodied, white men as the conduits for class revolutions, The Running Man and The Long Walk replicate hegemonic models of race and heroism that have plagued American cinema for decades. In his article titled “Marginal Males: Working Class Heroes in Recent Fictions and Films,” scholar Philip J. Landon cites films such as Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Taxi Driver (1976) as examples of films that use white, male, working-class leads to craft narratives of class resistance in post-Vietnam War America. Landon writes that historical realities are mythologized to establish “...the white, working-class male as an American Everyman…used to signify a country stripped of its dreams and uncertain of its future.” White men are seen as representatives of America and its ideals, which allows them to serve as the leaders of the country’s movements for change. Further, the characteristics that endear Ben and Raymond to audiences are reliant on their identities as white men. For Raymond, he is shown as a wholesome family man, emphasized by a heartbreaking exchange with his mother on the sidelines of the walk. His fight for a better life for his mother upholds the notion of the traditional, white American family, at least to the in-universe audience. This is contrasted by Pete, who has no family to speak of. From the first scene of The Running Man, Ben is characterized as rageful, to the point that the show’s producer (Josh Brolin) claims that he is the angriest man to ever participate in the show. He screams directly into the camera, murders the in-universe law enforcement, and even smacks his ass to the audience to express his indignation. While he is justified in his criticism of the authoritarian political landscape that forces poor people to play fatal games for the chance at a dignified existence, Ben’s whiteness allows him to be an acceptable vessel for these subversive attitudes. In-universe viewers and real-life viewers are given recognizable archetypes for heroes. In positioning white men at the forefront of class struggle, The Long Walk and The Running Man replicate the hegemonic ideals that determine who is allowed to be the face of a movement, and who is relegated to a passive figure who must be saved by whiteness.

Despite being based on source material hailing from decades ago, The Long Walk and The Running Man remain relevant in their focus on class inequality and the exploitative nature of media conglomerates. Though brave and devoted to their Black counterparts, the lead characters of both films are depicted as the only ones strong, smart, and capable enough to save those around them. In a country where Black women are seen as incapable of executive leadership, Black people are disproportionately affected by economic downturns, and law enforcement are encouraged to abuse racial and ethnic minorities, both films take the easy way out in depicting their respective class revolutions. Instead of relying on past ideals of heroes, today’s American films would benefit from relinquishing the standards of the past and shifting its spotlight to those whose lives are most at risk. Only then will filmic revolutions be fully realized.

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This year, we attempted new changes, and though we weren’t as consistent, we now have a stronger foundation for 2026.

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   Our writers and even guest contributors will pick one film or special TV episode and write at least one sentence, no more than one paragraph, on why they are recommending you watch it for that day. 1 film a day. No repeats, unless part of a double feature recommendation. Each recommendation will be posted on FD's social media. If the film is hard to find/cost a fair bit to watch, we will recommend a more accessible alternative.

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There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see. In the case of the riveting AMC+ series Interview with the Vampire, there are shrines for every wayward sinner to create. Anne Rice’s timeless story follows Louis de Pointe du Lac, a man in 1910s New Orleans who is turned into a vampire by the elusive and charming Lestat de Lioncourt. In the velvet depths of immortality, love becomes a sacred artifact that is choked to death and canonized — love being the only thing that remains in a world where time doesn’t stand a chance, where every memory is a blink when faced with the cruel reality of never enjoying the finite. AMC’s Rolin Jones-led iteration of Rice’s story shows us the dangers and fascination of the undead, and that there is one thing that remains when time becomes an accessory to life: the need for love.

Louis de Pointe du Lac, our unwitting protagonist, is the subject of the titular interview. Played with charming intensity by the incredible Jacob Anderson, he is a pressurized, intensely focused man who, in the second season, turns into a husk, desperately trying to find who he is while keeping his wit and love intact. He describes himself in season two as “an armored thing,” moments before falling in love with his second doomed paramour under a Parisian streetlamp while romantic piano music swells. There are so many shrines built for Louis by his lovers and those he loves. As a Black man with enterprise in the 1910s, he feels his core is splintered by the expectations placed on him. Even in his own recollection of himself and his actions, the details are fractured: Was it raining? Did Claudia dream? Who wanted to burn the body? The pressure of idolatry by others bleeds through into his functioning psyche so much so that he doesn’t know which version of the truth told to him to believe. He is a man in perpetual suffering, trying to decipher himself through the fragments of story that his mind allows him to tell.

Lestat de Lioncourt, the French vampire whose turning of Louis kickstarts the entire series’ events, takes on a haunting, borderline monstrous role in this series as a man who can suck the air out of any room and reflect it back to every person with blinding enchantment. Let me be clear: Sam Reid is doing some of the best character work of our generation with every laugh, swing of the wrist, and lifting of the finger as Lestat. His is an acting finesse I believed to have died decades ago, but I see a magnificent revival of it every time his blonde curls ravish the screen, whether in haunt, memory, or — in the rare case — actuality.

Lestat prances around a scene with all the assumed self-confidence and gallant movements of the first man I ever loved — the same rote charm that allowed my first kiss and time to be stolen in the folds of a single night. In tandem with his lilting French compliments is a coldness, an underlying frozen statue of cruelty. The terrifyingly unpredictable rhythm of Lestat taking a companion is the same rhythm my psyche has remembered from all the men who’ve scarred me: every kind gesture of ‘rekindling romance’ with his dear Louis and every pity tantrum are all part of the same song that every person in the throes of mistreatment will recognize immediately as the work of an abuser. Lestat’s God is himself — blame it on his 250 years of unchecked power and easy trail of lovers. The same vampire we see in a flashback tossing around a wooden statue of Jesus in front of his believers is the same vampire who, at the end of the same scene, carries his mortal first love with a Christ-like side wound, and the same vampire who will seduce the most powerful vampire by the end of the episode’s runtime. For Lestat, love is a flagellation, a standard which he will somehow never meet, and he makes it everybody else’s problem. His shrine is littered with dust and half-meant poems, candles burned only halfway down before he changes his mind.

The show’s ensemble is equally as extraordinary: vampire Armand (the refreshing Assad Zaman) uses his haunting presence and centuries of life to extract vengeance quietly. He’s a sullen, satisfying puppetmaster whose existence in the shadows of the narrative is reframed by a deeply nuanced performance. A mystery unto himself, a sinister air bubbles very close to the surface at any given moment. His shrine feels ornate and terrifyingly single-focused; his love for Louis, extracted through questionable mediums, flows from his veins when he says he “wants him more than anything in the world.” That love is a candlelight he protects with his soul, but not so far as giving his life for it.

Our interviewer, Daniel Molloy (the inimitable Eric Bogosian), acts as a fantastic literary audience surrogate. His Molloy is a lived-in, curmudgeonly writer well past his prime who is chasing what he believes is his final shot at a jackpot of a story. His brilliance is woven throughout the titular interview with a Bourdain-esque cynicism, which any true reader of the late chef’s work could recognize was hiding a deeply budding tenderness. Molloy’s down-to-earth analysis pulls the viewer out of the supernatural and weighs in the true humane cost hidden in Louis’ oft-times romanticized and ever-changing recounting. He provides a necessary brutality, a finessed severity to the series that allows us to reconsider our (mine especially) ideas of journalism as a profession — what it means to study a subject, knowing that you’re being studied right back. His journalistic exchanges with his subjects blur fascination, a lingering haunting personal memory, and a very obvious financial goal.

Together, the two actors playing Claudia (Bailey Bass in season one, Delainey Hayles in season two) create a single lifeform, and are deeply worthy successors to 11-year-old Kirsten Dunst’s original performance. Through her diaries and through Louis’ eyes, what Claudia is to the narrative changes effortlessly between the two actresses. There’s the ray of levity she provides to the household; the innate, unnatural horror she represents in being stuck in a pre-teen body as her emotions turn too ginormous for her physical self to hold; and the weathered woman, older than she will ever look, fighting to find her place and taking Louis with her, desperate to make sure he will always be okay. Her never-ending tragedy, her eventual folly, and the inner shrine she keeps in secret are the single blazing, meticulously kept candle that she holds for her father to choose her over his abusers. It’s a flame that will always be lit under her severity; he is the only thing in this world she can consider her own.

The horror — besides blood lust, blood lost, and spit exchanged — is the idea that, when faced with the reality of a never-ending existence, humanity (or undeadness) will always find a way to love as messily and destructively as always. We build shrines over and over, destroy them, tend to them, sanctify them — just for the other person’s unpredictability to stunt us. The world will always belong to our own need for it, and no matter how long we live, we loop the same ache.

I guess I, too, keep shrines: I can’t smoke a Vogue Slim without thinking of the brilliant woman I fell in love with in Paris, her ghost pressing its weight on my thighs when I sit on the stool on my balcony. And I write this piece as an ode to a show that an almost-lover recommended to me, a “G” tattooed on my bicep as an ode to a time where a Scotsman marked my hours. Maybe this is the year, the month, the birthday where I learn to find the shrines that can be a sanctuary for me, not only because of me.

Interview with the Vampire is currently streaming. The latest iteration, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, is set for release in 2026.

Children have to trust the adults around them in order to survive, – yet adults are fallible, inflicting damage on the kids in their orbit even with the greatest of intentions. Even more tragically, “[m]ore than 550,000 children are known to U.S. authorities to be abused.” In the age of social media, people have been increasingly exposed to the violence and death meted out to the children in Palestine, Sudan, the DRC, and more due to the genocidal and capitalist urges of tech oligarchs and fascist rulers. Their suffering can become depersonalized when experienced through the small screen, but we must remember that any one of us could be those children. Every adult was once a child, who through luck and circumstance got the chance to grow up – not every child gets that chance. Two 2025 horror releases (Bring Her Back and Weapons) deal with the helplessness that children face when dealing with neglectful or abusive adults. The two movies tap into a common secondhand pain – we understand that children suffer without help because adults either don’t care enough or want to hurt them. Bring Her Back and Weapons forces us to sit with children’s pain and asks if we will allow it to continue.

Bring Her Back looks at the dynamics of abuse within a family and how the foster care system can fail the children it purports to protect. The film centers on step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), the latter of which is visually-impaired. After their father dies, the two kids are sent to be cared for by foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins). From their first contact with the foster care system, it is clear the callousness that bureaucracy breeds. Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), the children’s social worker, presents the plan to separate the siblings, citing Andy’s past as a “troubled kid.” As a teenager merely three months away from being eighteen, Andy is almost an afterthought in their search to place Piper in a loving home. While eighteen may be the age of majority in Australia, he’s still a kid, which the people around him seem to forget when it’s convenient.

As bell hooks says in All About Love, “In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children’s rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse . . . children can only rely on well-meaning adults to assist them if they are being exploited and oppressed in the home.” As their foster mother, Laura becomes the siblings’ autocratic ruler. From the moment that the children arrive, it’s clear that Laura is more excited to welcome Piper than Andy. She gives Piper a beautifully decorated room, while Andy gets a glorified storage closet. Laura goes so far as to insert herself into the experience of the two siblings at their father’s funeral, making Andy look at his father’s corpse, then trying to force him to kiss the body on the lips. She barely knows this child and yet feels completely comfortable ignoring his discomfort to make his body conform to her desires. In the aforementioned scene, she keeps whispering, “It’s custom,” calling to mind all of the acts that adults force children to do because it’s custom or tradition. To the adult, a child’s consent does not have to matter.

It’s also important to recognize that Laura is no stranger to loss: she was the mother of a similarly blind girl named Cathy (Mischa Heywood), who accidentally drowned in their backyard pool. Overcome with grief, Laura plans to use Piper and the young Oliver/possessed Connor Bird (Jonah Wren Phillips) as the raw materials for her ritual to bring the soul of her daughter back in Piper’s body. She uses her position of power as foster mother to gain the trust of the children and manipulate the system in order for her plan to succeed. She gets Andy and Piper drunk after the funeral and facilitates Andy opening up about his abuse. Andy reveals that his and Piper’s father favored Piper and would beat Andy out of Piper’s earshot to the point of him passing out. Like Andy’s abusive father, Laura takes his pain and twists it to distance him from his sister. She hits Piper in the night and blames the violence on Andy, drawing on his history as a troubled kid and even going so far as accusing him of being abusive “[j]ust like [his] dad.” Laura’s mothering is extraction. She wants the love of her daughter, to be called “mum” again, so she will do anything to the children now in her care that will result in her daughter’s resurrection.

Andy is the movie’s tragic figure, a young boy traumatized by abuse who tries to protect his sister despite the obstacles put in place by the adults around him. In his seventeen years, he’s neglected and abused by his father, shuttled into the foster home of a woman who wants to kill his sister, and killed by that same foster mother. His braces underscore his youth. He had to trust adults, but they failed him over and over and over again. Andy demonstrates the struggles of children and teens who cannot rely on their guardians to keep them safe.

Weapons uses allegory to express how addiction in parents can affect their children. Told in non-linear chapters, the movie unveils the circumstances that led to the disappearance of seventeen children from one classroom in a Pennsylvania school. Two people in the film explicitly show alcoholism: Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher whose classroom had the missing kids, and Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a cop who had a relationship with Justine in the past. Both characters relapse during the events of the movie, illustrating the fallibility of so-called trusted adults. Their two professions represent figures that children are told to trust: teachers and cops are also supposed to be moral arbiters, showing kids how to be upright citizens. Their fallibility can upset a child’s understanding of who to trust in the world. After all, if a teacher and cop hurt you, who is left to confide in? However, like parents and people generally, teachers and cops are susceptible to moral slip-ups. In a world where children’s human rights were sufficiently protected, the imperfection of adults wouldn’t have such dire consequences, but that is not the world we live in.

Building upon the instability displayed by teachers and cops being beholden to addiction, writer-director Zach Cregger depicts the effects of parental addiction on the child with the story of Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid that didn’t disappear from Justine’s class. Speaking about Alex’s chapter in the film in a Rolling Stone interview, Cregger says, “I lived that chapter as a kid … it’s very much what it’s like to have a parent who’s an addict, and the child has to become the caretaker as this sort of foreign thing comes in.” The “foreign thing” that Creggers refers to is addiction, which is represented in the film by the equal-parts mysterious and malicious Gladys (Amy Madigan). Gladys takes Alex’s loving parents and turns them into mindless automatons that execute her every command. Because they’re basically motionless when not following orders, Gladys forces Alex into being his parents’ guardian. He does the grocery shopping and feeds his parents canned soup to keep them alive.

An already introverted kid, Alex becomes even quieter after Gladys enters his life. She threatens him by saying, “Now, when I tell you that you are not to speak about me or your parents to anyone, you understand what can happen if you break your promise. I can make your parents hurt themselves. I can make them hurt each other.” She goes on to imply that she’ll know if he tells anyone, scaring him from ever disclosing to a trusted adult what’s going on at home. In this case, it is a supernatural occupation in this case but more typically is abuse or neglect. The statistic cited above only counts the known cases of child abuse in the US. Undoubtedly, the number is much higher because there are children like Alex scared into silence. Alex has no respite; the specter of his dysfunctional home life haunts his time at school. He even has to save himself at the end of the film, turning the enchanted children against Gladys, who they rip apart limb from limb. This ending feels cathartic because the children, victims of the adults they’re surrounded by, get to destroy the symbolic cause of their suffering. They exact revenge on the adult who harmed them in a way that children rarely, if ever, get to do in real life.

Adults often cite “protecting the children” as their rationale for vicious rhetoric and actions. One example is Trump’s executive order against medical transition for trans kids. Another is the anti-abortion justification that they’re saving children, meanwhile these natalists do not similarly consider the conditions into which these children will be born. Concern for children is often just political theater. 2025 horror films like Bring Her Back and Weapons unflinchingly present the precarity of children’s situation in an adult society. They invite the viewer to transfer the empathy given to the children onscreen to the ones offscreen. It is easy to be a silent witness to the horrors inflicted upon children, but it’s time to do the difficult thing and become the adults that kids can trust.

The figure of the decrepit old woman has always existed in popular culture. She was the witch, the crone, the grande dame – a warning of age and spectacle. Though in the wake of the pandemic (and the general digital decay of the 2020s), her image is familiar, but her presence has shifted. In films like Barbarian (2022), X (2022), and Weapons (2025), she returns not as the hysterical spinster or faded out diva, but as something stranger and more inhuman. These women emerge as omens, spectral reminders of what happens when care and connection erode.

Before she became this symbol of social decay, she was a star. The modern hag descends from the Grande Dame Guignol of the 1960s, a cycle of horror films built around aging actresses staging their own declines. In “Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother,” Peter Shelley explains that this character merged the poise of the grande dame with the grotesque spectacle of the guignol, combining the poise of the former with the macabre of the latter. One of the subgenre’s signature images, Bette Davis’ face caked in white powder, leering into a mirror, evoked both pity and awe in audiences. Films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) transformed the aging woman into a spectacle, fusing camp theatricality with emotional violence. Authors like John Baxter famously called the subgenre “sado-gerontophilia,” a morbid fascination with watching glamour curdle into the grotesque. Though the subgenre’s horror lay not in exploitation, but in the tension between dignity and degradation, women trained for elegance now appear in roles that demanded madness. The Grande Dame Guignol offered actresses that had been cast aside in Hollywood the ability to terrify on their own terms.

Over time, these performances evolved. As the grande dames aged out of the spotlight, the archetype they embodied fractured and spread. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the hag persisted in smaller, more subdued forms, i.e. Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976) and Diane Ladd in Invitation to Hell (1984). What had once been operatic performances of decline became a recurring presence across lower-budget thrillers and domestic horrors. The once common setting for Grande Dame Guignol, the ornate mansion, now gave way to kitchens, attics, and neighborhoods, but the public’s fascination with aging femininity endured. By the 2010s and 2020s, the hag and hagsploitation had changed: what started as the collision of prestige and degradation had thinned and morphed into something starker and more symbolic. She was truly a hag, no longer a performer trapped in the spectacle of her own aging; she had become a sign, a living symbol of cultural collapse. It’s this iteration, the inhuman hag, that defines her 2020 run. In films like Barbarian (2022), X (2022), and Weapons (2025), she emerges not as a relic of stardom but as a figure emblematic of social decay.

In Barbarian, the hag takes the form of “The Mother”, a towering, deformed woman, lurking in the tunnels of a desolate Detroit neighborhood. The mother is not so much evil as she is a vestige, a relic of forced maternity. Her lullabies and baby bottles are gestures of care turned into rituals of control; she imprisons rather than nurtures, her captives are forced to nurse as she whispers comforts in a voice unaccustomed to communication. What unsettles about “The Mother” is not her brutality but her warped tenderness – she is attempting to care in a world that no longer needs her. The film situates her within a vacant landscape, blocks of abandoned homes with entire streets devoid of life. “The Mother”’s stale underground home is a mirror of the silence above; she is not just the return of repressed motherhood but the ghost of care itself; she is an echo of intimacy that has been twisted by isolation. If Bette Davis’s Baby Jane screamed for recognition, Barbarian’s “The Mother” is howling into a void. The horror she evokes is not disgust, but pity, a recognition of how loneliness can mutate into something feral. Her body is a monument and a warning, an inhuman product of the outcome of prolonged neglect.

TI West’s X situates its hag, Pearl, at a crossroads of sex and death. An elderly woman on a rundown, rural farm in Texas, she spies on a group of young filmmakers shooting a porn movie on her property. What follows is less of a slasher and more of an elegy for visibility. Pearl longs to be looked at, touched, and desired. She wants to feel alive again in a world that’s deemed her too old and unfuckable. Her desire is less for youth and more for vitality: her sexual appetite is excessive and uncontrollable, turning her from a human into something near feral. Like the divas of the Grande Dame Guignol, Pearl is a performer, even as her body fails her. She clings to gestures of glamor that no longer fit. The filmmakers’ freedom only serves to amplify her exclusion from the world of touch and attention that once defined her. In lashing out, Pearl is not trying to punish the youth for their desire; she is simply desperate to prove she is still a star, and still desirable, proving through her brutality that her body can still provoke an audience.

Where films of old staged aging as tragedy, X stages it as excess. Pearl’s body is too alive and uncontrolled, especially in a culture that sanitizes desire and treats sex like a spectacle. The silence of the farm, the rot of the walls becomes less of a horror setting and more of a metaphor for a culture rotting in repression. In Pearl’s old and withered body, the film locates horror not in the death she enacts, but in the persistence of her life that doesn’t fade.

Zach Creggers’ most recent film, Weapons, truly transforms the hag into a mythic and inhuman symbol named Aunt Gladys. What sets Weapons apart is that it’s difficult to locate Gladys in a single body; she appears in dreams and nightmares, the apparition in the corner of the eye, the echo of a neighbor no one remembers meeting. The suburbia she haunts is quiet and sterile, doors equipped with cameras and systems to keep each other out, and neighbors who do not speak and only suspect. Gladys isn’t a monster who sneaks in, she is the parasite that thrives in the cracks in the community. Her invasion is what happens when suspicion replaces care, when the absence of neighborly trust creates space for something unrecognizable to move in and make itself home. In Weapons, the hag is a symbol of social entropy, the embodiment of a culture that’s so detached from physical connection that community is porous and exploitable. Her monstrosity is a natural consequence of a world that no longer looks after each other.

Across these films, the hag evolves from the grotesque to the elemental. The Grande Dame guignol was obsessed with endurance, aging women refusing invisibility, but these hags are beyond that struggle. They endure not as individuals but as examples of a world devoid of empathy. They are, to invoke Barbara Creed’s “The Monstrous Feminine”, nonhuman figures who reveal the inhumanity of the human itself. The monstrous woman no longer represents simple abjection or fear of the maternal body – she exists in an area outside of humanity altogether, revealing what’s left when human empathy, connection, and relation dissolve. That’s what defines the modern hag, she isn’t a woman that’s gone mad, but a mythic figure representing the left behind of civilization. These hags inherit the theatricality and performance decay of the Grande Dame guignol and translate it into a different register: they are no longer the spectacle of the body, but the spectacle of emptiness.

In the early 2000’s, Platinum Dunes (Michael Bay’s fledgling production company) seized on an old strategy: remake the familiar and turn the old new again. To build industry legitimacy, the company began by reviving iconic horror franchises through slick, big-budget reimaginings; reboots of iconic films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Friday the 13^th (2009), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) not only reintroduced audiences to iconic villains, but also rewrote their origin stories. Departing from the mythic opacity that defined figures like Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger, Platinum Dune’s reboots opted instead to embed their monstrosity in frameworks of trauma, loss, and deprivation. This marked a shift in contemporary horror filmmaking, turning away from the inscrutable villain, and turning towards a more legible and sympathetic one. Rather than presenting slasher villains as unknowable forces of evil, these films sought to make men of monsters by reconstructing their villainous origins and adding psychological, environmental, and ideological interiority. This shift signalled a wider transformation in horror’s moral and narrative logic, shifting towards one that regarded causality and explanation over wanton chaos. Where slashers of yesteryear traded in masked figures, senseless killing, and dispassionate evil, these reboots treated horror as something to be understood. By giving villains complexity, these reboots provided an emotional infrastructure that challenged audience expectations, reshaping our notions of fear in film and real life.

This shift can be understood within the broader cultural context that shaped the horror reboot boom of the 2000’s. Many of these films were produced in the years following 9/11, a moment marked by a cultural obsession with origin, justification, and the need to make sense of violence. Random violence was something that had to be decoded, and as James Kendrick argues in his essay “The Terrible, Horrible, Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Remakes, Reboots, Sequels and Prequels”, horror cinema after 9/11 was driven by a compulsive return to trauma. Horror could no longer leave monsters unknowable – the genre had to build an explanatory infrastructure around its threats. In this way, the horror reboot became more of a remediation of the original. Updating not only the aesthetic but the epistemological frame through which monstrosity could be understood. These early Platinum Dune productions set the tone for how horror reorganized itself to narrate fear. In doing so, these reboots tell us something about where horror has been, and more importantly, where the genre is trying to go.

Of the three Platinum Dunes films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is arguably the most visually driven; the horror in the film is more about suggestion, conveyed through the mise-en-scène and tone. The film opens with grainy faux-archival footage and voiceover by John Larroquette (reprising his role from the original), which evokes documentary conventions and frames the narrative through a forensic lens, lending the film a realism that is more aesthetic than fact. Throughout, the film emphasizes grime, rust, and rot: the camera lingers on flies over carcasses, crumbling metropolitan infrastructure, and yellowed fields. The sickly greenish-yellow tint of the cinematography evokes a rural America that has been left behind economically and morally. The Hewitt family (a rebranding of the original Sawyer family) is a grotesque embodiment of rural neglect; they are parasitic, cannibalistic, and mean, the structure of their environment has led to a decay of character and morality. The film crafts a world that has long since collapsed inward, and Leatherface is its monstrous byproduct. Though he never speaks, he is a silent, looming presence. The family speaks for him, giving him the name Thomas Hewitt and alluding to his mistreatment at the hands of others. The film refrains from incorporating long monologues or flashbacks to trauma, but everything around Leatherface gestures towards ruin. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre satisfies the ritualistic elements associated with the slasher subgenre, but it also opens space for an ideological reading of the film. This is then clarified in the 2006 prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), an entirely origin-based film that creates an even more explicit backstory for Leatherface.

While The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gestures toward its history through aesthetics, Friday the 13^th turns inward, reimagining Jason Voorhees, not as the mythical unstoppable force, but as a character shaped by his grief and isolation. The film’s opening wastes no time recontextualizing the canon: in this version, Jason is not dead, but a young boy who witnesses his mother’s beheading. The film suggests an immediate psychological fracturing as Jason picks up the machete that killed his mother and hears a voice telling him to “kill for mother.” This realignment is overt, taking Jason from an enigmatic figure to a man formed by isolation and maternal loss, living in and defending what little territory he has left. The film constructs this transformation both literally and psychologically. Jason’s underground tunnel beneath Camp Crystal Lake becomes a symbolic representation of his fractured mind, and is also emblematic of the reboot’s logic: instead of appearing out of thin air like a ghostly, ephemeral creature, this Jason is far more functional. He sets traps and hoards items, grounding his monstrosity squarely in a realist logic.

The most psychologically nuanced of these reboots, A Nightmare on Elm Street, does not simply re-explain Freddy Krueger’s origin: it adds texture and context to his beginnings, grounding this updated origin at the center of the film’s moral and narrative structure. Here, Freddy is not initially presented as a mere villain; instead, the film plays with ambiguity, questioning whether or not he was falsely accused of his crimes. This question drives the majority of the film, destabilizing the viewer’s alignment with both Nancy and Freddy. The audience is asked to consider the reliability of repressed memory and entertain the idea that Freddy could be a wronged man. Eventually, the film does confirm Freddy’s guilt and sadism. Flashbacks reveal his predatory nature, his death, and the town’s complicity. By waiting until the third act to confirm Freddy’s crime, the film implicates the audience by forcing the viewer to be complicit.

The decision to change Freddy from only a child killer to a child killer and molester was considered by some to be too dark for the franchise. However, this shift is crucial to the film’s function. It turns monstrosity into a site of epistemological tension; the horror in A Nightmare on Elm Street does not lie solely in Freddy’s actions, but in the viewer’s unstable proximity to him. The audience is positioned to vacillate between bloodthirsty mob cheering as Freddy quips and kills, to disgust and disassociation as his true nature is revealed.

Taken together, these three reboots chart a trajectory in early 2000s horror where the genre didn’t just recycle familiar tropes, it retooled them to accommodate shifting cultural needs. These films rewired how audiences engaged with monstrosity, with horror itself, and with how the viewer is meant to feel. What emerges is a hybridized genre, combining elements of typical slasher iconography with psychological thriller and melodrama. The affective impact comes not only from the fear response, but from the process of unpacking what that fear means.

Traditional slasher films operated on a forward propulsion: nonstop, relentless violence delivered with minimal motivation. Now, these reboots operate on a backwards logic. There is still a monstrous killer, but the narrative is now diagnostic, and the monster becomes a solvable and understandable figure, not just an abstract force.

Platinum Dune’s horror reboots ushered in an era that, more than reviving familiar characters, reengineered the frameworks through which these monsters could be understood. Across films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, a clear pattern emerges: the monster is no longer just a figure of terror but a subject embedded within traumatic systems of history and memory. These reboots reconfigure the horror genre’s relationship to villainy by narrativizing it. Earlier horror pictures relied on myth or opaque villain logic. The monster appeared fully formed, and their violence a perfunctory genre convention. But the reboots of the 2000s reflected a changing cultural and cinematic mood. In an America defined by 9/11, the nation’s anxieties became obsessed with origin, justification, and the logic of who to blame. American fears were no longer squarely in the unknowable; they feared the process of discovering what had gone wrong. This turn toward the explanatory reflects the ever-evolving function of the horror genre; it is not merely meant to frighten, but to diagnose. These reboots maintain the same semantic trappings of their predecessors, but the narrative now pivots around explanation, flashback, and visual motif to contextualize. Ultimately, these reboots signalled a transformed genre, one that reflects a deeper shift in cultural logic, where fear and explanation are tethered and the monster must now be known.

In 2025, we are the horror movie victims – violence abounds globally as late-stage capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy come to their (un)natural conclusion: death or subjugation of the Other. These ideologies also foster an us vs them mentality, in which, what Audre Lorde called the mythical norm (“white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure”), is against anyone outside of it. Still, Lorde named this the mythical norm because it doesn’t really exist, nor does it make good on all it guarantees these young men. Even the people who are promised the world are disappointed with reality. This frustrated ambition breeds monsters, which we see in politics and movies. 2025 films Friendship, Lurker, and Twinless serve as cautionary tales for what white men are willing to do when their manifest destiny of unlimited success is not achieved.

In all three movies, the white male protagonist’s relationship with another man is the catalyst for a psychological unraveling. These plot devices call to mind the so-called “Male Loneliness Epidemic” that has been peddled about in headlines to guilt women into partnering with men who are becoming more and more radicalized to the right. While loneliness between men and women is comparable, women, especially young women, are significantly more liberal than men. As partnership with women may be difficult due to the widening gap in politics and priorities, men can become insular, seeking relationships with other men to fill the gaps that a woman typically would in heterosexual dynamics. This is particularly evident in Friendship, which sees Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) develop an unhealthy obsession with his cool neighbor and local weatherman, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd).

Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is a series of social situations that induce secondhand embarrassment more visceral than a traditional horror movie. The titular friendship set up in act one of the film gives Craig a sense of fulfillment and the ability to live vicariously through Austin’s seemingly perfect life. Austin ends the friendship after an incident involving boxing, eating soap, and the phrases “I’m a bad boy” and “I’m sowwy.” Craig replies, “You all accepted me way too fast. You can’t do that. You made me feel too free.” Craig undergoes the same disappointment of young white men who realize that it’s not possible for them to receive all that was promised to them by the mythology of whiteness and patriarchy.

Robinson brings his characteristic style of awkward comedy to horrific ends as he attempts to recapture the magic he felt while part of a (masculine) community. Craig pops up on Austin at his new job and breaks into his house, inadvertently stealing a gun. The movie culminates in Craig dragging his wife Tami (Kate Mara) to the tunnel system that Austin introduced him to in the beginning of their friendship. Tami ends up getting lost in the tunnels, and Craig goes home to pretend as if nothing happened. Craig allows Tami to become collateral damage in his quest for male friendship and fulfillment. Robinson’s wacky performance shows just how insidiously male violence can be hidden beneath a seemingly innocuous veneer of goofiness. Friendship is a comedy, so the audience is invited to laugh at Craig and his desperate ploys to prove himself as a man. However, the danger he puts Tami in is real, and there are some real heartbreaking moments when Tami realizes who exactly she’s married to. Craig’s desire for Austin and his all-male friend group leads him to cast aside the only woman in his life, and makes him unable to comprehend genuine love.

Alex Russell’s Lurker pushes this misogyny to even more violent ends. This film sees Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin) plucked out of obscurity by up-and-coming pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Similar to the situation with Craig and Austin, Matthew is exiled for pushing his ex-coworker/friend, Jamie (Sunny Suljic), off a ladder. Matthew’s eyes adeptly switches from warm to cold when he realizes that another man stands in the way of him becoming Oliver’s best friend. He is not afraid to lie and cheat to get what he wants, no matter who he has to hurt.

The film depicts Matthew’s particular callousness with the women that surround him. Shai (Havana Rose Liu) is part of Oliver’s crew, but Matthew readily dismisses her in favor of the men in the group. She becomes ancillary to his rise. His grandmother is more roughly cast aside because he sees no value in her. Matthew scolds her like a child, destroys her property, and disregards the financial safety net that she provides for him. The woman pays for his flight from England, after Oliver and co. strand him, without a hint of gratitude from her grandson. She’s just a cash cow to him, an insurance policy in case his dreams don’t come true. This feeling is familiar to women of all ages – women are expected to care for the men in their lives, often at the expense of their own wellbeing. It’s easy to imagine Matthew’s poor grandmother walking on eggshells, looking after her grandson as best she can while trying not to set him off. From his hair-trigger temper, she could just as easily be on the other side of his violence.

Matthew’s machiavellian nature comes to a head when he puts the wellbeing of two teenage girls on the line to blackmail Oliver. He gives the kids backstage passes to Oliver’s concert, where Oliver gives them drugs and alcohol and has sex with them. They are sixteen. Oliver is not blameless for this horrific event, but Matthew knew something would happen to those young girls. He not only set them up for assault; he hoped for it. Oliver records (what those two fans may grow to see as) a traumatic event and gleefully uses the video as blackmail to regain his top spot in Oliver’s crew. It doesn’t matter to Matthew that no one there truly likes him. In fact, he revels in the forced camaraderie. This dynamic turns even more chilling when considering the racial dynamic between Matthew and Oliver. Like the insidious white liberals from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Matthew idolizes Oliver’s talent and cool; he wants to bask in his presence even if he can’t be him. You get the sense that he would crawl into Oliver’s skin if he had the chance. Matthew turns Oliver into his plaything; they become master and servant, though Matthew would certainly see it as muse and artist.

In the end, Matthew wins. He has his claws deep in Oliver, a career as a director, and the kind of cultural cachet worth millions if you’re a white man in 2025. His triumph feels true to life. After all, isn’t the world currently being terrorized by white men incapable of creating compassionate community? Lurker holds a mirror up to reality, forcing us to see the losers that society has let catapult to stardom.. He couches his behavior in the excuse that he’s the only person unafraid to be “real” with Oliver, but his “realness” just so happens to necessitate brutality. He has no true confidence in his own skills and charisma, so he cuts everyone else off at the kneecaps in order to stand tall. He is whiteness personified, an anxious bundle of mediocrity whose only weapon against oblivion is to make everyone else incapable of succeeding.

James Sweeney’s Twinless similarly condemns the lengths to which insecure white men will go. The movie follows the relationship between Roman (Dylan O’Brien) and Dennis (James Sweeney) after they meet at a support group for twinless twins. What Roman doesn’t find out until about two-thirds through the movie is that Dennis has been lying the whole time and never had a twin. In fact, Dennis inadvertently caused the death of Roman’s twin, Rocky (Dylan O’Brien), by accosting him in the street after Rocky ghosted him post-one night stand. Like Craig and Matthew, Dennis seeks to fill the emptiness in his life through schemes and deceit.

Once the film reveals that Dennis has been lying the whole time, the rest of the runtime is a descent into disgust and dread for the moment that Roman realizes that Dennis is a fraud. One thing to note is that Dennis has a twin fetish; throughout his hookup with Rocky, he talks about twin things and asks about Rocky’s twin. Dennis sees Rocky as his dream come true, his fetish come to life. He then develops an obsession with Rocky that leads him to fake being a UPS worker to gain access to his building and follow Rocky after seeing him leave with his boyfriend. His desire overrides all social rules that other people implicitly know to follow. He believes that the world revolves around his wants and justifies any means that may lead to his ends.

This is what catalyzes his infiltration of the twinless support group; he sees Roman inside and imagines an opportunity to still live out his fantasy. Roman, like Rocky, is not a real person to Dennis, at least not at first. He’s an image, a symbol. Dennis’s twin fetish was born out of a deep loneliness. He wanted someone connected to him by a shared time in the womb. He has thus far failed to form lasting, meaningful relationships, so he dreams of a person forced to be his best friend. That is what the twins played by O’Brien represent to him. Twinless twists the objectification usually forced upon women in film to show how men can dehumanize each other. Dennis’s gay identity places a psychosexual flavor on his obsession, but it is not so different from Craig and Matthew’s. All three men reduce the object of their affections to things meant to serve their egos.

Another similarity between these films is the disillusionment that the main characters go through when realizing that Austin, Oliver, and Roman respectively are fallible human beings just like them. For Craig, this happens when Austin’s hair piece comes off, revealing a bald spot. For Matthew, this is his successful blackmailing of Oliver. For Dennis, this is getting to know Roman and realizing he’s more of a meathead jock than his brother. What’s interesting is that these men do not reevaluate their priorities after these “the emperor has no clothes” moments; instead, they double down. To discard their masculinist fantasies would mean to do away with the myth of masculinity that lies at the core of their sense of self. If there is no masculine ideal to strive for or cozy up to, they fear that life will be listless and meaningless. They force meaning into their lives through violence both emotional and physical. They leave the victims of their manipulations in their wake with little regard for the pain they cause. In the wealth of horror movies to come out in 2025, they are the scariest monsters.

Despite being an exemplary tale of the inextricability of the familial and the political, One Battle After Another fails to honor the invaluable role that Black women’s reproductive labor plays in the revolution.

When audiences are introduced to a modern-day Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in One Battle After Another (2025), it is clear who does all the work in the family. Bob is shown smoking a bowl in his car, building up the courage to attend a parent-teacher conference. It is in this conference that we learn that his sixteen-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is an outstanding student. Her strong grades and clear leadership abilities, coupled with a sequence of her taekwondo prowess, paint a clear picture – she is exceptional at all that she does, which is a direct opposition to her father. But Bob wasn’t always that way – sixteen years prior to this moment, we see Bob in what almost feels like another life. He was an explosives specialist in a militant group, the French 75, and it is through this group that he met Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).

The French 75 is a multi-ethnic group of revolutionaries seemingly committed to the liberation of all people. This goal is evidenced by their freeing of immigrants from the cages of a detention center, an act that speaks to the current leftist movement to abolish ICE. The French 75 boasts several Black women beyond Perfidia, namely Deandra (Regina Hall) and Junglepussy (portrayed by the performer of the same name). Outside of the rebellion group, the audience briefly meets a few more Black women characters: Perfidia’s mother, Minnie (Starletta DuPois), and a former French 75 member turned nun, Sister Rochelle (April Grace).

Through these characters, One Battle After Another depicts how Black women are punished for challenging the strict confines of the fragile conservativism that exists within American political policies. Apart from Perfidia’s mother, every Black female character experiences carceral violence. Junglepussy and Deandra are arrested, while Sister Rochelle is held at gunpoint by several officers while her convent is searched. Despite surviving, Perfidia faces some of the most dehumanizing treatment at the hands of law enforcement. After being captured, Perfidia is brought into a hospital, her body slumped in a wheelchair while officers cheer and take celebratory photos. Even more horrifically, it is revealed that she was raped by military officer Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), resulting in her pregnancy.

The term “motherwork” was coined by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins. While feminists had long discussed the undervalued reproductive labor that women are expected to perform within heterosexual family units, Collins developed the term to “soften the dichotomies in feminist theorizing about motherhood that posit rigid distinctions between private and public, family and work, the individual and the collective.” While reproductive labor mostly pertains to household matters for nuclear families, Collins explains that motherwork is more communal in nature, noting that the survival of marginalized communities greatly relies on this labor from women. For Black and Brown women, mothering cannot be separated from politics.

Though One Battle After Another places itself and its politics firmly within the Trump 2.0 era, the racial subjugation it showcases is as old as America itself. The notion of the Black women’s labor being crucial to the survival of their community predates Collins, most notably by Angela Davis in “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards of New Womanhood.” Speaking to the dual role of Black women as a source of labor and a leader within a family unit, Davis writes of enslaved women, “Domestic labor was the only meaningful labor for the slave community as a whole...even as she was suffering under her unique oppression as female, she was thrust into the center of the slave community. She was, therefore, essential to the survival of the community.” One Battle After Another is far removed from the chattel slavery Davis writes of, yet the labor demanded of Black women is similar.

Black women’s reproductive labor is all over One Battle After Another. The film’s central conflict is driven by Lockjaw’s pursuit to eliminate any trace of his interracial attraction, a desire that manifests physically in the character of Willa. And, despite being a child, Willa is the one taking care of Bob. While he attempts to control her whereabouts through traditionally patriarchal overprotectiveness, Willa cooks and cares for the home, even going as far as leaving food out for him, thus reversing the typical parent-child dynamic. Bob’s depiction as an incapable but loving father is played for laughs and helps to emphasize the remarkable nature of his fight to save Willa. However, this characterization undercuts the pressure and developmental damage that such neglectful parenting likely causes.

It should also be noted that Bob’s neglect of Willa is depicted as being charming, yet earlier in the film Bob scolds Perfidia — who is in the depths of post-partum depression—for not acting like a mother. And just as Willa must step in to care for her father, it is Black women who come to her rescue after Lockjaw begins his pursuit. Deandra saves Willa from her high school dance and transports her to a safe house. This place of refuge is led by another Black woman, Sister Rochelle. Here, Willa is taught how to shoot, a skill that will eventually save her life. In their nurturing of Willa, Deandra and Rochelle are the embodiment of motherwork; they must balance the reproductive care of providing shelter for a child while also conducting the physical labor of being a revolutionary militant. Deandra and Rochelle are not connected to the two white men at the center of the film, Bob and Lockjaw, so they occupy a limited amount of screentime regardless of the centrality of their efforts in saving Willa.

The lack of scenes between Willa and Deandra feels like the film’s most egregious absence. The audience is briefly introduced to Perfidia’s mother, Minnie (Starletta DuPois), while she cares for Willa before Willa and Bob are forced to relocate. In the same scene, Deandra is also seen holding the baby before solemnly saying goodbye. This scene hints at the necessity for Black women to care for younger generations, especially in the face of constant persecution, but this idea is never given the chance to materialize. From this moment on in Willa’s life, she’s cut off from the Black women who cared for her. As Deandra drives Willa to the convent, they are framed in the car with darkness all around them, communicating that they are alone in the world. There is power in this image, but the two women are not given the opportunity to discuss or even recognize that fact. This failure not only destroys the possibility of seeing Black female companionship in the film, but it also renders its Black female characters as nothing more than means to an end with no interiority worth exploring onscreen.

Unfortunately, the undervaluing of Black women’s work, as well as the erasure of Black female solidarity, is all too common in narratives shaped around social movements. While male activists such as MLK Jr. and Malcolm X became figureheads for the civil rights movement, the labor of activists such as Diane Nash and Ella Baker went largely underrecognized. The female figures who are more recognizable, such as Coretta Scott King or Mamie Till-Mobley, are typically regarded through their roles as wife and mother, respectively, thereby diminishing their accomplishments and relegating them to traditionally feminine roles. In the post-civil rights movement for Black Liberation in the United States—which is alluded to in the film with references to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”— figures like Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Kwame Ture are largely remembered as leaders. In contrast, the invaluable labor of Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver, and Ericka Higgins is overshadowed, especially in their tireless efforts to promote womanism within the movement.

Despite being an exemplary tale of the inextricability of the familial and the political, One Battle After Another fails to honor the invaluable role that Black women’s reproductive labor plays in the revolution. As Bob proudly exclaims, “Viva la revolución,” it is the labor of Black women—both the self-sufficiency Willa is forced to develop and the protection that elder French 75 members provide —that allows for the film’s protagonists to triumph over the white supremacist state. As is exhibited by these characters, motherwork is dirty work; it forces women to expend themselves physically and mentally, places the burden of survival on their shoulders, and forces them to constantly confront the interweaving of personal and political while receiving little to no glory. In co-opting the language of revolutions past and present, One Battle After Another inadvertently replicates the erasure of women’s labor that stained those movements. The film ends with Willa and Bob reunited. Even for just a moment, good triumphs over evil, and love trumps hate. In a time of vicious civil rights violations and a growing sense of political helplessness, hope is necessary for survival. But in maintaining this hope, it is crucial to recognize the women whose labor makes our survival possible.

Colonialism loves to turn people’s lives into a spectacle; detached observation, pretending toward scientism, is a way to humiliate the colonized. This is something Taratoa Stappard’s debut feature, Mārama, is acutely aware of. Horrific when not unsettling, Mārama is a fantastic exposition of a kind of colonial violence that is often difficult to depict with stark clarity: a fetishistic obsession, the kind cloaked in paternal care, the kind that doggedly wants to crawl into the skin of those it oppresses, erasing them and taking their place. With a stunning gothic vocabulary that harkens back to Jane Eyre, Stappard depicts colonialism’s hungry predation, all while allowing hope for something more human than survival to shine through.

The film takes place in 1859, following Mary Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) as she works to uncover the truth about her family. A Māori teacher from Aotearoa (New Zealand), Mary was raised by adoptive parents, an Englishman and a Frenchwoman, and has no knowledge of her Māori family. When she receives a letter from North Yorkshire, from a man who promises to reveal her family’s identity and secrets to her, she heads to the British Empire immediately. There, she is taken in by Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens), a wealthy man who accumulated his fortune whaling in the South Seas, and his niece. Nathaniel persuades Mary to stay on at his grand yet chilly house, serving as his niece’s governess. Mary agrees but finds herself haunted by memories that aren’t her own, and ghosts of people she’s never met. As she tries to understand her visions’ meaning, she finds herself moving closer and closer to discovering her family’s fate.

One of this film’s achievements is allowing us to watch the watchers, to see their roving and ravenous exploitation. Nathaniel’s home is a glossy and lifeless museum, cold and dark, studded with tokens both sacred and mundane of Māori culture. At first, it seems that Nathaniel holds benign respect for the Māori people; a “respect” that is jarring in its apparent benevolence at a time when many white people thought the Māori inferior and did violence unto them. He says at one point that he made it a point to employ Māori men on his whaling ships because of how skilled they are as seamen. But gradually, something sinister emerges in the man, in the way he looks at Mary, the way he talks about her people. As Mary walks through the manor and as we see more and more of Nathaniel’s “collection” of artifacts, it dawns on us that something much more evil than respect is taking place in the Cole home.

This is a tough film to watch for the way in which it steadily depicts tokenism and colonial obsession, but it’s tough only because it is grounded in reality. Colonialism loves to own cultures, pluck them from their lands and place them in austere display cases — in this and many other ways, Nathaniel is colonialism personified. Early on in the film we see that he has literally shipped a wharenui, a communal home, from Aotearoa and placed it on the grounds of his own home, as though it were a toy, a trophy to be displayed.

Colonialism loves to feel itself a god for whom other cultures are dolls to be manipulated, used, and abused. Colonialism loves to watch other cultures perform their rites, and in so watching, turn something meaningful into a show, a spectacle for entertainment. Having no meaning or justification for itself, colonialism robs other cultures, injecting itself with their lifeblood. Nathaniel, a true patriarch and colonizer, is himself an orphan like Mary, but unlike Mary, who searches for the meaning that was taken from her, Nathaniel fabricates his own meaning where there was none, by learning, wearing, and stealing Māori culture. This isn’t respect, Stappard shows us, because Nathaniel cuts bits of Māori culture out from its own context and places it in his own home, under his own control — this is observation with the goal of ownership and subjugation. Nathaniel feels that he can study and thereby pretend, successfully play-act as Māori, that the culture is something he can master and become more adept at than actual Māori people and their lived experiences; Nathaniel feels he can steal truth, manipulate it, and make it his own. For Nathaniel, watching is study, is vampirism.

One of the film’s most captivating scenes contains a macabre play. It’s Nathaniel’s birthday and a bunch of his white friends are in literal brownface, dressed up as Māori people, with many men dressed up as Māori women. A man comes in wearing a cardboard cutout of a whale and the partygoers kill it in an incredibly lewd fashion, using gestures clearly meant to depict sexual domination along with physical violence. Mary watches in horror as the white people make a mockery of her culture and turn it into costume, depicting Māori women as helpless and sexualized beings to be violently possessed by the whites. The partygoers laugh while Mary cries until she finally confronts them. She performs the haka, a ceremonial dance, because it flows from her immediately and organically, her culture rising up and standing its truth in the face of the white people’s offensive play, of colonialism’s knack for turning lived realities into fodder for entertainment. With a deft hand, Stappard shows Nathaniel simply watching, unmoved; the director shows us how truly evil people can never hold empathy or understanding within them, can never hold space for others because their own egos are so big. As Nathaniel watches, you can tell in the way he holds his head that he still does not respect Mary or the Māori people, because all he can do is watch, and he is never not watching without the aim of possessing.

Mārama’s greatest achievement is Osborne’s Mary. As Stappard excavates colonialism’s grotesque ferocity and exploitative nature in Nathaniel, he also allows the truth to stand tall and bright in Mary. The young woman fights in a way that no person should have to fight for their right to exist, but in a way that many people still do, because evil exists, working to snuff all light from the earth. Osborne as Mary is dignified and full, human and warm. With her wide eyes she conveys many lifetimes of sadness — she feels her family in her blood, and the strain around her eyes shows us that she feels their pain, too — and in her determined brows she shows us what it looks like to be proud of one’s heritage. Even as she is horrified, she is strong and determined enough to put up a fight, to take back her family’s life from Nathaniel’s suffocating hands.

The final moments of the film contain, in graphic terms, a literalization of the colonial possessive gaze — as I took in these moments, a familiar horror and indignation began roiling within me, as it is in Mary. In the corners of my sight I also saw people get up and leave. Though dark, I could still tell that it was white — blonde, at least, their hair a halo in the projector’s glow — members of the audience who were leaving, in an ostentatious display of indignation, as though an overt show of disapproval of Nathaniel. I remember thinking, this indignation is not for them to hold; they ought to stay and bear witness.

Stappard doesn’t have us watch these horrors so much as he invests us in them; because often when we do watch we tend to fetishize, and this film skillfully makes the distinction between the oppressor’s watching and the oppressed’s witnessing. Mārama is a story of reclamation — taking back culture and ghosts from hungry and fetishistic colonizers, and giving them the life and place in time, memory, and art that is rightfully theirs, that is rightfully alive — and as such it is a mighty and unignorable being.