‘Undertone’ is High Fidelity Horror That’s a Tight, Relentless, Sonic Terror
VVS Films/ Dustin Rabin

When it was still doing the festival circuit, I listed Undertone as one of the best horror movies coming out of Fantasia 2025. I described it as being like experiencing Paranormal Activity if it was in audio format, so it delighted but didn’t surprise me that during the run, director Ian Tuason was grabbed to helm the eighth installment. Now with a shiny new title card from A24, fresh voice acting (hello, Adam DiMarco), a tightened title (“drop the ‘the’”), and a tenser edit (from Sonny Atkins), Undertone is ready to terrify a larger audience with its punishing audio track.

Evy (Nina Kiri) and Justin (DiMarco) are a pair of podcast hosts who squeeze recordings into their challenging schedules. Justin is recording from the UK and Evy is marooned to her childhood home to provide support for her mother’s palliative care, so the duo records their spooky show at 3:00am her time. Typically playing off each other as the skeptic-versus-the-believer exploring supernatural true crime phenomena, the two enter strange new territory when they live record their reactions to ten audio clips sent to the show via cryptic email. The clips start off like the early moments in the aforementioned Paranormal Activity, with audio of Mike (Jeff Yung) recording his partner, Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas) talking in her sleep, but things escalate when Jessa starts singing haunting kid’s songs in reverse. The duo does their best to plow through the remaining audio to cobble together a compelling episode, but they’re often interrupted by a need for sleep, an urgent call, or a bump in the night.

Evy has mostly protected herself from fear with her skepticism, but that changes when she finds herself connecting more and more to the audio. As references to the demon Abyzou ramp up, Evy considers if she is the next target for a malevolent force whose screams seem to transcend her plane.

Again, Undertone lives and dies by its audio, the entire movie taking place in a single location with Evy’s headphones as a gateway between worlds. Every crunch of cereal, whistle of a kettle, or tick of a clock is an anti-ASMR stab in the ear creating a persistent sense of unease. The audio is invasive, taking up space in Evy’s home, asking the audience to consider what might have taken place just over her shoulder. Tuason and his DOP, Graham Beasley, went to the Mike Flanagan and Leigh Whannel school of weaponizing negative space and they use empty corners of Evy’s house to ask the audience to use their imaginations and the audio to fill in haunts. Shots of Evy’s back leave her looking so vulnerable to the tin cans placed atop her ears. The only faces we ever truly see are Evy’s and her mother’s, forcing us into her same isolation. Evy might leave the house, but the camera doesn’t and paired with toggling shots between Evy or the entity’s POV, it makes the entire experience claustrophobic forcing the audience to fester in dreadful seclusion.

Undertone is sometimes a grab bag of horror hits, taking its concept of an audio track as a conduit and decorating it with religious iconography, haunted songs and myths, and even a fugue state crayon scratch of something scary. But with that, its guerilla Canadian horror filmmaking at its finest; a liminal horror feature put together by scrappy bubbling creatives. The set is the director’s house, the audio clips were recorded before principal photography, and death rattles and in-world phone calls were recorded by sound guys into iPhones. Something that started with everyone on set placing objects in frame then hiding to add scares to long shots turned into an entire theater reacting to a mirror scare like the audience gasping at the wall climber in Hereditary.

Undertone is a refreshing flip on screen life that uses phone calls and audio clips to bring a large story into the small room of a target protagonist. Is it a lesson in catholic guilt for a skeptic who’s been avoiding her mother’s religious zeal? Perhaps. But above all, it’s a tight and contained terror that will leave audiences trying to find a way to use their blanket to cover their ears.

Undertone hists theaters March 13, 2026

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Wants You To Look up From Your Phone at Sam Rockwell
Briarcliff Entertainmnent

It can be challenging to put your phone away for the entire runtime of a movie and challenging still for some to not immediately grab it as the credits roll to log that movie on an app or post a quick reaction. Social media and the dopamine box in our pockets sing a sweet siren song, one that will hopefully be dulled by Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. In a meta-comment that asks us to pay attention, this latest wacky surrealist dark comedy has us to consider what the internet and AI are taking from us, and encourages us to act sooner rather than later.

Sam Rockwell leads as no Kyle Reese but an unnamed time traveler purporting to be from a bleak not-so-distant future. He’s seen the collapse of modern life due to a propensity towards social media brain rot that left half the population dead and the other unknowingly living in an apocalyptic hellscape. With a grain of knowledge that this night in this diner is the way to solve the future crisis, the time traveler gathers whatever combination of people seem willing to join his revolution hoping to find the magical combination that makes his plan succeed lest he have to start the night over again. While the future sees humanity doomed to live inside a utopic videogame, the man seems to live in a modern one where any failure means he must start from the beginning. On his hundredth or so attempt, he seems as close as ever.

Director Gore Verbinski came out of a decade-long retirement to get his scent on this zany dark comedy. Some of his slappier sensibilities came along for the ride, imbued mostly within Rockwell as the weirdo lead in a dirty clear trenchcoat you would follow into battle. This close-to-home feature about where we all seem to be headed is as fun as possible, marked with dark deadpan humour and an ensemble cast you won’t believe gave themselves over.

For all its zany bits, social satire, and pitch-black lampoons of our bizarre social media loving planet, there is a distinct lack of real teeth. Sure, it’s dystopic that teachers have caved to students and their phones and that cloned children are subsidized by the government if they’re victims of school shootings, but the satire hesitates to push past the glaring and lacks that brutal bite. (In good news for those who enjoy this movie and want more of the same) Films like Spontaneous have employed such bleak satire before with sharper effect, making Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die seem like a flick trying to catch up to its cohorts. It’s full up with references to Terminator, The Faculty, and the like, some meta-films themselves that have already been rolled into movies like Cooties, Ick, and Mom and Dad.

The non-linear storytelling is the strongest element of the narrative as it has the audience find the hero already well into his crusade, then gives it time to take in haunting vignettes that highlight just how weird things have gotten. Time is well spent with the complacent teachers struggling to capture students’ attention, a grieving mother trying to bond with an ad supported clone, and a young woman allergic to wi-fi. But for as zany as the vignettes are, they are built on similar on-the-nose messaging that’s been better executed by similar movies.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is exciting for the fact that it’s got a familiar cast and crew that will draw broader audiences into the weird-sci-fi-dark-comedy fray that’ll leave people primed to be referred to things like Relax, I’m From the Future, Rumours, Dream Scenario, and those others I couldn’t resist mentioning above. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hits theaters February 13, 2026

Ralph Fiennes and Nia DaCosta Ensure ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ is as Tender and Horrific as the Beloved Series Demands
Sony Picutres, Miya Mizuno

Two decades was a worthy waiting period for the third installment of the beloved British zombie series, but nary a year has passed before we’ve been graced with more. Named for the memento mori crafted by the series’ most tender character, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple continues the terrifying tale of a deadly infection while never shedding the warmth that makes the series worth returning to. With Ralph Fiennes leading the film’s sweetest, mad, and most jarring moments, this follow up feature gives more weight to the idea that this might be the most consistently powerful cinema franchise.

Picking up where the last film left off, Spike (Alfie Williams)- who is now called “Jimmy” – has become a reluctant new member of Jimmy’s fingers. He is initiated via a gruesome fight to the death, and his prize is that he must don a shaggy blonde wig, give up his personal identity, and submit to the whims of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his violent delights. Much like Jim and Selena before him, Spike has been absorbed by a nightmare group of humans he must depend upon for survival.

Meanwhile and elsewhere, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, in an extension of a career defining performance within a career full up with them) is still studying the whims of the beasts in the woods, coming closer to an Alpha he’s named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Samson, a spine ripping brain-eater, seems to find solace in Kelson’s choice weapon: a tranquilizer dart full up with morphine. Though the conversation is one sided, the communication is not, and Kelson’s dart provides an opening for him to consider if the infected have truly departed from their humanity.

The two groups might never cross, but Sir Jimmy is placed at the feet of Kelson when one of the members of his squad mistakes him for “Old Nick,” or Satan as it were, the man from whom Sir Jimmy claims to have gotten his status and marching orders.

The two prime stories are interspliced and carry with them distinct tones, the two tones that have made the 28 series such a lasting view of humanity in the time of gruesome crisis. The Jimmys’ are violent and cruel, their tribulations bloody and ablaze. Kelson and Samson experience tenderness, fear, hope, and a simple world where pieces of humanity are clutched to by a man in a world without any. Newcomer director, Nia DaCosta (Candyman, Hedda, et al) takes the reins from Danny Boyle who directed 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later and continues to prove herself one of the most important working filmmakers. She has dipped her toes into a well-established sandbox and managed to make the film feel completely consistent to the franchise while bringing her own voice to it. There’s less of the shaky cam panicked violence and more of the tender moments and brighter blood which makes everything feel familiar while fresh.

So much is jammed into what is purported to be a second installment in a new trilogy, but it never feels overstuffed. A second part can be doomed to feel like a bridge between a new story and its finale, but 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (which is still written by series scribe, Alex Garland) refuses to let that neuter its stakes. Anyone can die, and stories are brought to natural conclusions in time to welcome new ones for the presumed finale. Further, things about the infected are escalated in ways that will leave zombie nerds flipping through notebook pages, wondering if we’ve ever seen the infected in these lights before. Have we seen them at rest? Consuming brains? Just being? It’s sometimes hard to accept such a twist on the franchise (and genre) but damn if it’s not compelling.

It’s perhaps tired from me, but it continues to be magical how this series represents the modern world. Tales of clutching to elements of joy in a world where one cannot let their guard down, and what it means to be alive on a cruel planet that didn’t come together for a global crisis seem ever prescient and increasingly beautiful. “I remember the certainty,” Kelson reflects, something people in this era might look back upon with a fleeting affection. Good luck to the rest of 2026 because it’s going to be difficult to best this titan.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hits theaters January 16, 2026

Timothée Chalamet Brings His A-Game to the Raucous ‘Marty Supreme’
Elevation Pictures

One need not brace for the trite biopic standard when sitting down to watch Josh Safdie’s latest. The story of Marty Reisman (Marty Mauser by way of Timothée Chalamet in the film) is loosely adapted for this snappy drama that, if anything, uses ping pong as a background timekeeping device more than it does a major plot point. Marty Supreme is much more the next story of a fallible Safdie hurricane than it is a historical tribute to a late pioneer. And it’s all the better for it.

Mauser is in a similar precarious position to his cohorts in Howard Ratner (Uncut Gems) and Connie Nikas (Good Time), staying just barely avoiding drowning but choosing to sprint rather than tread water. He’s a sharp mouthed brat (a pisk, if you will) adept at the kind of charm that’s only effective until he keeps on talking. He’s an eye on an important prize: a ping pong tournament abroad that will grant him global acclaim. Mauser needs the cash to get himself there, and the resources to get there in style. So sets off his calamitous sprint through match losses, affairs, a nagging mother, a would-be business partner, and a pregnant old flame with a protective beau. Marty is a hurricane, like Safdie protagonists before him (though this one was crafted without Benny- but with their longtime collaborator, Ronald Bronstein). He is constantly in messes of his own making, something he feels slighted by as he is just doing “what it takes” to succeed.  Mauser uses people as rungs as he climbs to what he believes to be his manifest destiny.

Safdie sets his frantic drama in 1950s New York, where a generation of Jewish immigrants are still reeling from the holocaust. There’s the sort of scrappiness in Mauser one might expect to see in tales of post WWII gangsters like Benny Siegel or Meyer Lansky, men contending with being on the receiving end of a particular form of racism and refusing to be brought down. The backdrop allows Mauser to self-justify his sharpness and entitlement and also allows him to better appear a burden to Americans reeling from a war where they were made to liberate his people. It also lends Mauser a shorthand to interact with others in his neighbourhood and build the sorts of allyships that are only slightly more difficult to bruise with his antics.

Chalamet, who was already a favourite around cinephile circles, earns his place as a lead in a contender here. His delivery of Mauser’s snappy dialogue is deliciously funny, and his playful smugness is endlessly effective. Looking as much like a bar mitzvah boy as he does a snappily dressed 20th century man, he is able to play with the earnestness and entitlement of a man who has both childlike wonder and the weight of adulthood rushing through him. He’s complimented by titans in his co-stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, but there’s reason the character is titular.

Marty Supreme is a frantic tale of “pride before the fall” that’s dressed up like the most gorgeous period piece complete with fresh garments and detailed storefronts. Set against a table tennis tournament is the story of a snappy young pisk whose success comes from disobedience, the disobedience inherited into a people who were on the wrong side of a quest for extermination. 

Marty Supreme hits theaters December 25, 2025

Tiff 2025: ‘Little Lorraine’ Takes the Crime Drama to Cape Breton Waters
Wango Films

Buried between the larger-than-life stories about the crime that shaped twentieth century North America is a lesser-known story of the Little Lorraine fisherman who got involved in international cocaine smuggling. Though details are difficult to find, there exists a Canadian diddy by Adam Baldwin called “Lighthouse in Little Lorraine” about some former miners getting caught up after taking a job with the narrator’s mysterious Uncle Huey. The music video for the narrative track was directed by Andy Hines which he eventually pivoted into a proof-of-concept for what is now his debut feature film, Little Lorraine.

Little Lorraine takes place in the titular town following a small gang of miners who are left without work after a collapse takes some of their colleagues and leaves their mine unusable. Faced with the decision of taking a small payout and leaving their homes or looking for work elsewhere, Jimmy (Stephen Amell) considers a cryptic offer from his mysterious Uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie) who has rocked back into town with a lobster fishing boat. With few options and a hard-to-shake rage against their union, Jimmy and his pals board Huey’s ship for a modest life of lobster catching. But things with his estranged flakey uncle aren’t as simple as they seem and the gang is quickly initiated into the world of international drug smuggling, something for which there’s no easy way out.

Hines’s tale of small-town men being thrust into the world of crime will feel familiar to crime drama fans who will expect the usual beats of a rapid rise followed by a paranoia led fall. Little Lorraine isn’t all-the-way surprising in its story beats, but it doesn’t need to be as it applied the crime drama formula to a fresh locale intent on exploring the complexities of maritime men in the 1980s. While its cohorts are no doubt crime dramas, it also feels a compelling companion to this year’s 28 Years Later as it studies manhood in an otherwise simple life with a larger-than-life conflict looming overhead.

The stellar cast of not just Amell and McHattie, but Matt Walsh, Rhys Darby, Sean Astin, also includes the acting debut of J Balvin as the fish-out-of-water Interpol agent dropped into a small town. Though I so badly wished for his character to be more consequential beyond just shaking up Huey and the gang, he successfully plays the man from another world dropped into the simple life almost like the characters of In Bruges but with far less subtext about purgatory.

Little Lorraine is as unassuming as the wives of miners and quickly grows into a worthy crime drama about how fast life comes at you and the ills of paranoia and distrust so easily bringing calamity in a high-stakes environment. Though its emotional climax happens too quickly, it sets off a brutal finale focused on what it means to stand together as a town. For all the fraught and direct dialogue that could have been skipped, and all the times you beg for Darby or Walsh to have had more to do to build up to the larger moments, Little Lorraine is still a successful crime drama that stands firmly as a love letter to small town maritime Canada.  Like the song says, “there’s a goldmine out on the ocean and a lighthouse in Little Lorraine.”

Little Lorraine played the Toronto International Film Festival. It was sold to Vaneast Pictures and release details are tbd.

In lieu of a trailer, enjoy the music video.

Fantasia 2025: ‘Burning’ is a Surprisingly Feminist Rashomon Thriller
Fantasia Film Festival

It’s only a matter of coincidence that I recently made my way through Little Fires Everywhere which also started in media res with characters reacting to a home burning down leaving the audience to wonder what led to it. The similarities between these stories mostly ends there, but Burning does have that in common with the limited series.

Burning (or Ot), out of Kyrgyzstan, is somewhat of a black box for those unfamiliar with the film culture of the area or who know director Radik Eshimov from his work in television production (where he focuses on comedy). Though there are few laughs to be found in this haunting tale of subjective truth that ends in a pile of ash and a conversation lit by flashing lights.

As I mentioned, the movie begins after the fire as townspeople gather around the local convenience store (or “depanneur” for the Montreal festival audience) to swap stories of the days leading up to the events. The movie is then broken into three parts, each being from the second-hand perspective of someone who was in the house: the husband, the wife, the mother-in-law. It becomes a spooky tale that cleverly uses shifting perspectives and repeated moments and lines to change the views of the happenings without changing the ultimate truth. Eagle-eye watchers who prefer to examine scenes for what isn’t being shown directly will have fun here, but beyond that, audiences are slowly forced to face truth, subjectivity, and perspective as the movie rails on.

At the risk of saying too much, what’s special is how this movie discusses subjective truth and the perspectives of women, especially how they are squashed in larger conversations. “Maybe it’s all just a lie,” and “what if it’s the truth?” mark the final scene and were left seared into my field of vision as the finale pressed on. Burning’s Rashomon style tale so well examines the idea in a way that will ring relevant for most anyone on any side of any border.

But it does so without ever forgetting that it’s a horror movie. In ways reminiscent of Rear Window or Attachment in how it lets the horrors exist while characters might be unreliable or misinterpreting what’s in front of them. There are hard to watch gross-out scenes, djinn focused and other religious frights, and the scares one might associate with Rosemary’s Baby. Everyone has a turn at playing the monster, even those just recounting the tales as told to them.

Burning is the festival movie that utterly surprised me, showing up unsuspectingly as a haunt about a witchy mother-in-law and her immature charges as told through the eyes of gossips. As its story pressed on and the horror escalated, my expectations were delightfully subverted and I was left well-fed by such a rich horror story.

Burning played at the Fantasia Film Festival

Fantasia 2025: ‘Hellcat’ Leaves You Wondering Who is Infected
Hellcat Movie Still
Blue Finch Films

You awake to find yourself jostling around in a trailer. A disembodied voice emanating from a disembodied canine head informs you that you’ve been infected, and you’re on a clock to get to the only doctor who can help you. Stay calm lest you make it worse.

Lena (Dakota Gorman), a no-nonsense resourceful woman, does what we probably hope we’d all do and struggles to find her way out of the moving trailer using her wits and the random items tossed about her new cage. Lena concedes she is struggling physically, but it’s because of her pregnancy and not due to the mysterious infection the voice of the driver insists she has. The clock is ticking as Lena moves farther away from any civilization in which she belongs, and without her phone or a clear view to the outside, she is running out of time and completely at the whim of a ruthless driver who insists what he is doing is to keep her safe.

The chamber piece, or single location horror, becomes a battle of wits on the open road that leaves Lena struggling for a way out while also struggling with what is happening to her body. While the idea of a trapped person trying desperately to figure out what is happening while using limited items available to them feels much like Oxygen or Buried, Hellcat has even more in common with 10 Cloverfield Lane as the audience and lead struggle to decipher if their captor is helping them, trapping them, or a bit of both. Clive (the driver played by Todd Terry) is balanced but desperate and reads sometimes like a paternal character doing his best, but his best comes by way of threats, drugs, and off-screen violence.

Hellcat is mostly simple which can feel stretched in for a feature film runtime, but the powerhouse performance by Gorman makes the excursion an event. Almost all of the movie’s emotional weight comes from the lead’s stellar performance, one that’s peppered with extreme physicality.

Writer and director Brock Bodell has made a movie, like the aforementioned Cloverfield installment, which intentionally leaves the audience guessing. As Lena makes her way around the trailer while at the behest of Clive’s small cues, the audience is meant to attempt to decipher what caused Lena’s bite and why Clive is so insistent on his actions. The movie only gives the audience the information it wants them to have, and does so with breadcrumbs and in waves, then asks them whether they would subscribe to the same conclusions as Clive. It’s a fun game that makes it worth looking through the leads and into the background.

Hellcat is a stripped-down horror tale meant not to be slotted into a category until its larger reveals become broadly known in the zeitgeist. Its horror comes from toggling the true imminent threats and having its lead struggle along with the audience to decipher the real enemy.

Hellcat screened at the Fantasia Film Festival

The Long Awaited ’28 Years Later’ is a Tender Tale of Manhood at War
Miya Mizuno/ Sony Pictures

It’s almost difficult to slot the latest Danny Boyle horror instalment beside legacy sequels. Yes, it’s a long-awaited sequel of a rotting franchise, but there is no sense of reinvigorating the old or rehashing any updated storylines here. The third installment of the 28 movies comes in at about twenty-two years after the original and while it shares much in common with stories like Fallout or The Village (read: Running Out of Time), it pivots from a speedy sprint away from the infected to a slow walk into humanity.

It’s been fewer than thirty years since the rage virus ravaged parts of the UK, and a colony of survivors have set up a gated village on an island in the Scottish Highlands. They are a quarantined zone, living in a pocket world cut off from the rest of the planet which has moved on from the pandemic. The people of this area have regressed to the likes of pioneers in almost a primal retraction to medieval villagers. Like the greatest of zombie features, it taps into the fantasy of a world where the only worry is survival, this one without technology or AI, none of our politics or economic worry, just the early goal of returning from war and joining industry. Here, young Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his seasoned father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and ill mother (Jodie Comer). Spike is of a generation who has never seen beyond the walls of the fortified village but is forced to learn some real-world lessons when the pre-teen is taken by his father on his first visit to the mainland. There, Spike encounters the infected and is forced to defend his life with a quiver of arrows and his father’s paternal instincts. Disenfranchised and spooked by his ordeal and his father’s version of recovery, the young boy decides to visit the mainland again, this time only with his ill mother looking to pivot from being a soldier and hunter to a saviour and protector. Framing the rest like a road trip, 28 Years Later becomes a somber and tender story of a young boy choosing his own version of manhood. One who is forced to do so in place abandoned by the world and where fear is the only thing keeping people alive.

It’s a surprising turn for a sequel to films known for their high-octane scares. The fast-transforming and fast-moving zombies of this universe function to increase the tension and leave it at a lingering hum even during the quietest moments. But instead of making bigger, scarier, more monstrous infected (or instead of only doing that) Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (director and writer, respectively) chose to examine the fallout of such a pandemic and war, comparing Spike and his father to the sorts of men made by wars and global crises. The 1903 poem, “Boots,”- which was also used hauntingly and effectively in the trailer- about the Boer War is used early in the film. Throughout, there are interjections of scenes of other historical wars and soldiers. 28 Years Later is effectively an examination of a child learning manhood in a world that needs a specific version of it from him and choosing to forge his own path. Having spent most of his life under his father’s tutelage, his viewpoint is changed when he encounters a soldier, a doctor, an apparent cult leader, and versions of men who can teach him something different about who he can choose to be. The sum of it becomes a sweet tale of growth that imagines the weight carried by those on the front lines of or left behind by a crisis.

Stylistically, it’s a marvel what Boyle was able to do with a 2025 instalment of a franchise known for the aesthetic crafted in the early 2000s. Yes, he used the iPhone camera with some technology boosters, but the design and appearance also create a visual throughline. Out of the gate with a haunting cold open of children crying while watching Teletubbies, the movie is sprayed with a UK punk aesthetic. The movie doesn’t quite smell bad, but you sense that it’s all-over musty. The dizzying and frenetic edits keep the movie feeling like the guerilla blood fests you remember from 2003 and 2007, but it still fills the borders of a modern silver screen.

Where the zombie pandemic fantasy has often been about a world without modern stresses, 28 Years Later is coming on the heels of a real global pandemic that saw us retaining modern stresses which would eventually become exacerbated. It’s a tall order to examine such a thing, and perhaps why we’ve not seen any “world comes together to fight the evil,” zombie movies since 2019. Boyle and Garland’s story, instead, imagines the tears in such a fantasy, positing a world where we might regress into the likes of the Trojans or the Vikings, where instead of effectively working together to save the world, we’d send young men to the front lines and expect them to trade their lives for a version of manhood that supports someone’s idea of the greater good.

28 Years Later hits theaters June 20th, 2025

‘Bad Shabbos’ is a Gas
Menemsha Films

There’s enough reason to be tense about a meeting of future in laws, or machatunim if we’re being precise, without manslaughter but what’s a dead body between family? Bad Shabbos, a black comedy from Zack Weiner and Daniel Robbins, ups the ante on a religious standoff over family dinner by adding an accidental death that might look like a murder if it was revealed. Nervous guests and family dynamics are pushed to their anxious brink as they individually, then as a group, decide how to handle a stinky corpse hanging out in the powder room.

David (Jon Bass) and Meg (Meghan Leathers) are planning to get married, which requires Meg to begin the process of conversion in order to satisfy Jon and his modern religious family. In order to smooth the transition, they’ve invited Meg’s parents to Friday night dinner at David’s parents’ place so everyone can meet and her parents can get a sense of the tradition. Tensions are already high with Jon’s mother (Kyra Sedgwick) being less than accepting of Meg, Jon’s brother, Adam (Theo Taplitz), being a medicated foil to social situations, and Jon’s sister, Abby (Milana Vayntrub), sparring with her partner, Ben (Ashley Zukerman) who doesn’t seem to get along with anyone. After Ben clashes with Adam, Adam cooks up a scheme to dose him with his prescription laxative. But Adam somehow doesn’t know about Ben’s congenital digestive issues, and the cocktail of medication and dairy products knocks Ben off his balance and into the bathroom fixtures. Discovering his dead body, the siblings decide to protect Adam by covering it up and then are forced to do so during a hectic dinner where dynamics and relationships are already being tested.

The sprawling apartment, the countdown until Meg’s parents’ door knock, and a helpful doorman (Method Man), will all keep the bickering family on their toes as they navigate how to handle the tell-tale heart no longer beating in their powder room. That’s what creates the tension and allows for the comedy to spill over and into the New York City high rise.

Bad Shabbos wants us to laugh until we maybe toot and it’s mostly successful. Panicking family members and the comedic chops of people like Vayntrub and Method Man make for the tense kinds of laughs you want in this single location bruhaha. It’s not quite Clue or an Agatha Christie story, but it doesn’t seem to be trying to be more than a good old cluster of calamities where everyone is in on information at different times. It’s a less bloody version of a movie like Happy Times (2019), which sits closer to “comedy” on the “black comedy” spectrum making it easier to recommend to your extended family.

While there are certainly laughs to be had, much of Bad Shabbos relies on some outdated Jewish jokes and tropes about Jewish mothers it might be time to move on from. Jokes about the banks, the media, and unaccepting mothers are tired, but perhaps Bad Shabbos is taking ownership of them or exploring a personal experience that I can’t invalidate.

Bad Shabbos is an imperfect single location black comedy but one I am so happy exists. Clashing cultures, relationship and family dynamics, and tight dinner quarters are always ripe for solid explorations and gags, but chucking in a dead guy and an implicated murderer ups every version of that ante. For those looking for a harmless laugh, especially one about their own culture or similar experience with one, Bad Shabbos is a little delight, and a bit of a love note to the Jews of NY.

Bad Shabbos opens in NYC May 23, 2025 and LA and select cities on June 6, 2025

‘It Feeds’ is the Off-Season Sport for Fans of Jump Scare Greats
Black Fawn Distribution

The opening of It Feeds sometimes seems at a hint to the ending, but that’s only because it’s so reminiscent of another story about a supernaturally gifted cleanser of evil spirits. The cold open has its gifted psychic therapist working her way through a darkened world on another plane and witnessing a beast seemingly trapping a young child. It’s a lot like the finale of Insidious. This original Canadian horror feature has a lot in common with the great modern horror franchise, but it doesn’t seem to want to compete with it so much as stand proudly beside it.

Ashley Greene leads as Cynthia, a psychically gifted therapist who performs supernatural cleanses on her clients under the guise of offering traditional mental health care. As a way of protecting herself and her daughter (Ellie O-Brien) from prying eyes or those experiencing difficult demons, she has a set of rules to prevent letting their secrets out or bringing too much supernatural hazard in. When they meet a frightened young girl covered in burns who begs for Cynthia’s help and her garish father (Shawn Ashmore) who refuses it, they face an ethical dilemma where they have to decide if they should help her and potentially expose themselves to danger, and whether they should heed the warnings of the sharp patriarch.

 The rules of Cynthia’s practice are quickly established, but so are the rules of the movie’s in-world villains. It’s smart and makes for consistent storytelling where the stakes and dangers are always clear to the audience. Of course, it all comes down to cheering on Cynthia to slowly make the decision to assist, which requires the film to bring the danger closer to her. Cynthia has reasons to be reluctant and her daughter has reasons to push her, so they’ll each have to face or avoid the dangers on their own until Cynthia has to metaphorically suit up.

Writer/ director Chad Archibald knows his audience and knows his genre and either pays a lot of homage to it or borrows heavily from it. While the comparison to Insidious is apt and worn on the film’s face, it also has some plot elements that feel like Let the Right One In or even The Omen. The girl’s father’s motivations are difficult to track which makes for a clever secondary villain when different characters have different ideas about how to best a dark entity. It’s in these “disagreements” that It Feeds becomes more than another in the canon of demon jump scare movies.

Canadian horror fans will rejoice not only at another on our list of horror successes, but at the gaggle of Canadian genre icons like Ashmore, Julian Richings, and Juno Rinaldi (probably more of a comedy icon but I still cheered at her appearance). It’s still a good time to be a Canadian horror fan, and It Feeds is here to remind us.

It Feeds has a lot of unique elements that make it a worthy twist on familiar skulking-dark-entity horror, but in a lot of ways is a truncated version of those movies. It holds its own on plotting and scares, but much of it will feel familiar to fans of the canon of James Wan. Though I don’t expect it to spark its own long-running franchise of spinoffs and sequels, I do expect to see more from Archibald who could submit It Feeds as quite the impressive reel in a campaign to direct more like it.

It Feeds hit select theaters in April of 2025