“Weapons”
When your screenplay kicks off the kind of bidding war that gets industry retrospectives, you know you’re at the top of your game. Zach Cregger is horror’s golden child right now, but as long as he keeps making movies like “Weapons,” he’s not relinquishing that title anytime soon. “Weapons” features the same kind of kitchen sink energy found in “Barbarian,” Cregger’s first feature, but once again, the comedian-turned-horror-auteur proved himself a hit with audiences and critics alike. And who knows? Amy Madigan was just named best actress by the New York Film Critics Circle, so maybe “Weapons” has a real shot come award season. – MM
“Together”
A couple on the rocks isn’t new horror material, but Michael Shanks’ Sundance breakout has the nerve to treat codependency like a physical law—something that drags you back even when your mind is screaming “run.” Starring real-life spouses Dave Franco and Allison Brie as a musician and teacher trying to “reset” their relationship with a move, “Together” takes that familiar romantic lie (“you complete me”) and turns it into the kind of sickly-sweet body-horror metaphor you can feel in your teeth. The key is how lived-in the intimacy is before it gets grotesque—“Franco and Brie effortlessly conjure the entropy of a relationship held together by apathetic acculturation to one another,” Marshall Shaffer’s review from Sundance wrote, and that ease becomes the blade. When the film finally lets the genre mechanics off the leash, it doesn’t chase puzzle-box “metaphorror” so much as commit to the primal fear: being bound to someone you can’t quite quit. – Rodrigo Perez
“Bring Her Back”
The Philippou brothers’ follow-up to “Talk to Me” doubles down on what they do best: taking adolescent vulnerability and turning it into a pressure cooker, where grief isn’t an emotion so much as a contagion that infects every corner of the frame. Sally Hawkins is inspired casting as foster mother Laura—warm, awkward, and off in that way that makes you lean in before you recoil—while Sora Wong and Billy Barratt give the film a grounded, bruised-sibling heartbeat as Piper and Andy, kids trying to stay intact after their father’s death. The movie’s accessibility-minded approach to Piper’s vision (and the way it translates perception into form) is one of its most intelligent choices, and when the brothers unleash their practical-effects nastiness, it lands with queasy confidence. As our Sundance review distills it, “grief eats its own,” and “Bring Her Back” runs with that idea like a curse you can’t unhear. – RP
“Presence”
If Steven Soderbergh’s post-un-retirement run has been a string of sleek formal experiments, “Presence”—his reteam with David Koepp (“Kimi”)—is the one that feels oddly personal, like the craft finally exposes the man inside the machine. The gimmick is the whole point: a “phantom ride” ghost story told from the entity’s POV, the camera floating through a New Jersey house with chilly curiosity as a family’s fault lines widen—Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan as parents wrapped in self-interest, Callina Liang as daughter Chloe spiraling in grief, and Eddy Maday as the annoyed brother. It’s a movie where the “what” gets overtaken by the “how,” every scene forcing you to interrogate why you’re watching from this corner, this doorway, this angle—voyeurism as dread. And yet, as Marshall Shaffer’s Sundance review puts it, “Soderbergh is a master at disguising the work as an organic thrill ride.” – RP
