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Directed by Mikael Håfström

It's time to take a stand.

Stockholm, the fifties. Though academically bright, violent pupil Erik Ponti is expelled from his state school with the headmaster’s words “there’s only one word for people like you – evil… what you need is a good thrashing, and more”. In fact already Erik frequently receives a ‘good’ thrashing at the hands of his sadistic stepfather – so he is packed off by his mother to boardingschool

Andreas Wilson Henrik Lundström Gustaf Skarsgård Linda Zilliacus Jesper Salén Mats Bergman Johan Rabaeus Marie Richardson Lennart Hjulström Björn Granath Filip Berg Ulf Friberg Kjell Bergqvist Fredrik af Trampe Peter Eggers Henrik Linnros Sannamari Patjas Magnus Roosmann

Director Director

Mikael Håfström

Producers Producers

Ingemar Leijonborg Hans Lönnerheden

Writers Writers

Mikael Håfström Hans Gunnarsson

Original Writer Original Writer

Jan Guillou

Casting Casting

Maggie Widstrand

Editor Editor

Darek Hodor

Cinematography Cinematography

Peter Mokrosinski

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Kim Magnusson

Production Design Production Design

Stunts stunts.

Paul Gustavsson

Composer Composer

Francis Shaw

Moviola Film och Television AB Skinworxxx Nordisk Film Sweden

Denmark Sweden

Releases by Date

16 may 2003, 16 sep 2003, 25 feb 2004, 14 oct 2004, 12 nov 2004, 27 jul 2007, releases by country.

• Premiere Cannes Film Festival
• Theatrical 12

Netherlands

• Physical AL DVD
• Theatrical NR

113 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by amanda ★★★½

erik and pierre are now married & living in france as the power couple they always were

Review by raghaddd ★★★½ 1

dead poets society gone wrong

Review by 20oldboy03 ★★★★ 2

English Version below

Seht die niederfallende Ungerechtigkeit geballter Fäuste derer ich mich entgegenwerfe. Seht meine Pein verhärteter Narbenwülste am durchgedrückten Rücken. Seht mein Aufbegehren gegen die uniformierte Obrigkeit. Seht zu wie ich ihren Kindeskindern die Stirn biete gleich dem Ziele „mit dem Kopf durch die Wand“. Seht zu und erkennt das Falsche im diktieren Sein ihrer.

Daraus erkennt meinen Kampf als ein Muss entzweibrechenden Siegels. Siegel der stattlichen Beglaubigung ihrer jahrzehntewährenden Existenz. Eine in das Mark eingegangene Gesetzesmäßigkeit von Schüler zu Schüler weitergetragen ihres Aufstieges vom gepeinigten zu deren Verursacher. Beruhend auf diesem Fundament, seht und erkennt mein Stellen meines stählernen Willens aufrechten Ganges eines verinnerlichten gegen die Ungerechtigkeit.

Hebt Euren Kopf wie ich den meinigen. Seht aufrechten Seins erkennender…

Review by kajsa ❣️ ★★★★

this movie: hmmm how do we establish that this is set in the 50s??? by mentioning elvis and james dean in the span of three minutes

Review by thea ✿ ★★★★ 1

i wish gays and swedes were real though 😔❤️

Review by Hanif 1

Swedish bullies are hella corny. They out there reciting poetry and heidegger while they waterboard you or some shit

Review by katja ★★★

erik ponti underrated sigma

Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★½ 2

Cinematic Time Capsule 2003 Marathon - Film #55

”There are many different ways of making life hell for people”

When a young scrapper is carted off to an affluent boarding school he’s confronted with an overbearing Student Council of rich kids who take a sadistic pleasure doling out violent reprimands in the name of school spirit. Despite his own violent tendecies, Erik decides to see if he can rebuke their persistent bullying by using only non-violent means…. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well.

This Swedish Oscar nominated film is an interesting watch, with plenty of twists and and turns as you continously wonder if Erik will finally take off the gloves and serve those bullies an overly deserved heaping helping of bloody retribution.

”What happens when you hit them back?”

Cinematic Time Capsule - 2003 Ranked

Review by Andy Nelson ★★★★½

The film is called Evil and starts with a teen abused by his stepfather who then turns to incredible violence at school. The headmaster dismisses him, saying boys like him can only be classified with one word – evil. That's an interesting setup for a film and I was expecting to follow this young man on his descent into more evil acts as his mother moves him to a boarding house.

What I got was a surprise and made for a much better film. He's made the decision to focus on his studies and not let his anger provoke him to fighting. Unfortunately, he's ended up at one of the worst examples of 50s boarding school hazing and behavior as…

Review by Maj Augustin ★★★½

Me everytime Pierre and Erik were on screen together:

Kiss! kiss! kiss! kiss! kiss!

Review by Two Cineasts ★★★★

Film reviews in 22 sentences (or less) Today: Evil

Take a stand. Show courage.

Hi everybody, it’s been a long time since I last saw this movie, but again it was wonderful to watch. Many European awards and a Golden Globe- and Academy-Award nominations say enough, about the high quality of this much too unknown little masterpiece. The movie follows a young fighter who must move to a boarding school and must endure to be bullied, because if he would ever raise his fists again, he goes to jail.

The motion picture based on the autobiographical book by Jan Guillou, who also wrote the screenplay. Director of the movie is Mikael Håfstrom who later tries his luck in Hollywood, semi…

Review by Ken ★★★★½

Turns out the real evil was the friends we made along the way

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• What Is Cinema?

Evil Is the Best Show You Might Not Be Watching

One of television’s strangest, most beguiling shows returns for its second season early next week, pushed off of network television and left to languish—or maybe flourish—in the recesses of streaming. Evil (Paramount+, June 20), from creators Michelle and Robert King , takes the knowing, literate, hyper-contemporary tone of those creators' The Good Wife and The Good Fight and grafts it onto a story about the Catholic church, possession, and the Devil himself. It’s a creepy and bleakly funny series, a lament about our times that would never be so insincere as to suggest the supposed good can win in the fight against the dark.

The first season, which aired on CBS, followed a case-of-the-week structure while also attending to a larger mystery. Forensic psychologist Kristen ( Katja Herbers ) is enlisted by the church to look into matters of demons and other supernatural phenomena, a skeptic Scully to balance the show’s dreamy, furtive, priest-in-training Mulder, Dave ( Mike Colter ). With an even more skeptical tech guy, Ben ( Aasif Mandvi ), to aid them, Kristen and Dave investigate lots of eerie occurrences, all while stalked, taunted, and accosted by another psychologist, Leland ( Michael Emerson ), who is either Satan incarnate or a loyal lieutenant.

In the Kings’ nimble hands, all of this demonry becomes a metaphor for the sickness of the American present day, particularly the ways in which the internet has smuggled horrible things past lax defenses and into our daily lives. The show’s most alarming suggestion is not that something bad is coming for us, but that we are all already terribly infected with it; there is an arch hopelessness to the series that may sound off-putting in theory, but in practice is oddly soothing, cathartic. It’s fun to wallow around with a show that makes such a gallows humor joke of how well and truly fucked we are.

As with the Good series, Evil is terrifically cast. Herbers and Colter have an alluring chemistry, a sexual-intellectual pull that’s freighted with its own kind of danger. Christine Lahti has a great time as Kristen’s flouncy, hot-tempered mother, Sheryl, who finds herself in a curious and horrible romance with Leland. Emerson does, yes, mostly riff on his Ben character from Lost , but that nerdy menace works equally well here. A host of shrewd guest actors has passed through the series, too, adding to the air of cool, sideways smarts.

Evil ’s nerviest sustained trick in season one is keeping us guessing whether any of the spooky stuff we see—particularly a goat-headed man-beast who appears in dreams, and maybe in waking life—is actually real. Maybe the show is entirely allegory: Leland is a sociopath rather than an emissary of Lucifer, possessions are caused by physiological or environmental factors and not spirits from Hell. That ambiguity lets Evil really toss around its ideas; there is room to debate and theorize without anything smacking up against hard fact.

What I’ve seen of season two (only a pair of episodes) changes that structure a bit. (Some spoilers to follow.) The first season’s cliffhanger—did Kristen actually kill the serial killer who has been threatening her family?—is answered; so too, sort of, maybe, is the bigger question of the supernatural. The first two episodes dive deep into the core mythology of the series—though there is a standalone case to be considered in the second hour. I’m not sure I love this heavy focus on the show’s internal lore. I prefer the series when it’s using its clever devices to peer outward, examining the varied trends and oddities of our digitized, atomized lives.

Still, I have faith (heh) that the second season will find its best course. Evil season one is too good to be a fluke, the Kings’ minds too sharp and whirring to putter out after just a short run of episodes. The show’s relocation to Paramount+ also poses some intriguing possibilities. It is, so far, a satisfying jolt to hear these characters drop a few cutting curse words, as if they are suddenly unbound—or, perhaps more appropriately, that much more steeped in the profane.

The show’s humor is still intact, particularly as evidenced in a nasty bit of physical comedy involving one of Kristen’s daughters. Kristen has begun to worry—just a faint flicker, a gnawing little thing; we in the audience are of course much more concerned—that there is something wrong with the girl, maybe something demonic lying dormant in her since the womb that is just now revealing itself. That’s a familiar, but pleasingly grim, narrative possibility, and a strangely poignant manifestation of the fear that children born into the horror of today are inherently poisoned and doomed.

Cheery Evil is not. But it remains riveting television, mordant and sinister with a faint sadness hanging around its edges. Which is what a lot of life in the world can feel like these days, our ironically commented-upon descent into the murk of late-stage everything. It’s nice to have Evil trotting along as a fellow traveler, perhaps even leading the way with a wicked and welcoming smirk.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Nature vs. Nurture

Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows up his sublime drama “Drive My Car” with a parable about a rural Japanese village and the resort developer eyeing its land.

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By Manohla Dargis

Late in “Evil Does Not Exist,” a man who lives in a rural hamlet an easy drive from Tokyo cuts right to the movie’s haunting urgency. He’s talking to two representatives of a company that’s planning to build a resort in the area that will cover a deer trail. When one suggests that maybe the deer will go elsewhere, the local man asks, “Where would they go?” It’s a seemingly simple question that distills this soulful movie’s searching exploration of individualism, community and the devastating costs of reducing nature to a commodity.

“Evil Does Not Exist” is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s best known for his sublime drama “Drive My Car. ” This new movie is more modestly scaled than that one (it’s also far shorter) and more outward-directed, yet similar in sensibility and its discreet touch. It traces what happens when two Tokyo outsiders descend on a pastoral area where the spring water is so pure a local noodle shop uses it in its food preparation. The reps’ company intends to build a so-called glamping resort where tourists can comfortably experience the area’s natural beauty, a wildness that their very patronage will help destroy.

The story unfolds gradually over a series of days, though perhaps weeks, and takes place largely in and around the hamlet. There, the local man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a self-described jack-of-all trades, lives with his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), in a house nestled amid mature trees. Together, they like to walk in the woods as she guesses whether that tree is a pine and this one a larch, while he carefully warns her away from sharp thorns. A photograph on their piano of Hana in the arms of a woman suggests why melancholy seems to envelop both child and father, although much about their past life remains obscure.

Hamaguchi eases into the story, letting its particulars surface gradually as Eiko Ishibashi’s plaintive, progressively elegiac score works into your system. The company’s plans for a glamping site give the movie its narrative through line as well as dramatic friction, which first emerges during a meeting between residents and the company reps, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) and her brash counterpart, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka). The company — its absurd name is Playmode — wants to take advantage of Covid subsidies for its new venture. During the meeting, it emerges that the site’s septic tank won’t be large enough to accommodate the number of guests; the locals rightly worry that the waste will flow into the river.

The scene, one of the longest in the movie, is emblematic of Hamaguchi’s understated realism, which he builds incrementally. The meeting takes place in a basic community center crowded with residents — some had dinner at Takumi’s home the night before — who sit in chairs facing the reps, who, armed with technology, are parked behind laptops and seated before a projector screen. As the reps play a video explaining “glamorous camping,” there’s a cut to Takumi intently watching the promo. The scene soon shifts to a tracking shot of deer tracks in snow and images of Hana playing in a field as a bird soars above; it’s as if Takumi were thinking of his joyful, distinctly unglamorous daughter. The scene shifts back to the meeting.

The site will become “a new tourist hot spot,” Takahashi sums up, badly misreading his audience. “Water always flows downhill,” a village elder says in response, his thin, firm voice rising as he sweeps an arm emphatically downward. “What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream,” stating a law of gravity that’s also a passionate, quietly wrenching argument for how to live in the world.

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Evil review: Season 3 is hellishly fun

The best reason to subscribe to Paramount+ returns.

Recently ordained priest David ( Mike Colter ), vivaciously inquisitive psychologist Kristen ( Katja Herbers ), and trusty handyman-of-logic Ben ( Aasif Mandvi ) drive down a haunted highway. It's a lonely stretch of I-95 where truckers see visions and hear Satanic static. The trio keeps the mood up with a "Happy Together" sing-a-long. Then the radio blasts gross sounds, something red flies behind them, and the car shuts down. You're ready for anything, really: A demon, a scary truck, the terror of dead silence on an empty midnight road. They get out to check the engine, and Kristen sees something in the darkness of the forest. A person? A creature? The wind?

The moment should feel unusual. Evil (streaming Sundays on Paramount+) is generally a big city horror show. The three assessors explore possessions, chthonic infestations, and other spiritual oddities around New York City. But the series taps fears that are fairy-tale primal, even when the subject matter is freakishly modern. The dark forest is always here : The doomscroll of iPhone news, the search engine advertisement for a predatory videogame, the meme that kills. Christ, cryptocurrency . Evil isn't just about the internet. (It's also about parenting, the Vatican Secret Service, God's possible absence, centuries of Church-validated racism, the impossibility of home renovations, and why celibacy is hot.) But creators Robert and Michelle King have turned Evil into a paranoid opera for our derealized times. It's not uncommon for a character to declare themselves "disgusted with the insanity of reality." It's also not uncommon to see a hairy-breasted five-eyed demon working on an elliptical.

Season 3 picks up where last year's finale left off, with Kristen and David mid-smooch. She's married with four daughters. He just became an official Man of God, which means he's off the market , ladies. Evil zigs and then zags away from that will-they-or-won't-they moment, and expands its scope. A riotous new opening credits sequence foregrounds the massive cast around the central trio. There is more attention paid to Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), a no-nonsense nun who sees demons constantly, and to Kristen's therapist Kurt (Kurt Fuller), now a regular bench player in Evil 's squad. Kristen's cheerful husband Andy (Patrick Brammall) says he's home to stay. Ben's brilliant sister Karima (Sohina Sidhu) offers technical insight into his most confounding cases.

And I haven't even mentioned Kristen's mom Sheryl ( Christine Lahti ), who remains locked in a baffling danse macabre with Leland Townsend ( Michael Emerson ), Evil 's most visible agent of general badness. That would be a lot of characters for, like, a lay-around Netflix show with more budget than plot progression. But in its third season, this former CBS show retains the fundamental forward momentum of a network procedural, even when it merrily throws the formula out the window.

This past Sunday's premiere focused on a scientific experiment to find the weight of a human soul. It required the participation of a dying priest, Father Frank Ignatius, played by Wallace Shawn. Pause for a moment on the casting of Shawn, who plays a deeply moving death scene and then really turns his performance up. The formerly stern priest gets more or less resurrected with a scientifically-confirmed weight off his shoulders. His first act is to kiss old friend Monseigneur Koreckie (Boris McGiver): "I always wanted to do that." Unrepressed priest-on-priest romance, and we're only halfway through the episode!

In the five episodes I've seen, Evil 's weekly investigations run the gamut. There's a Google Maps prank that seems to be killing people, a pair of virgin newlyweds with possibly-possessed sex problems, and then "one of the worst building collapses in Bushwick history." As with The Good Fight , the Kings' other great ongoing series, the breakneck speed of a genre thriller becomes an excuse to chomp through a lot of recent headlines. When Sheryl asks a celebrity influencer to endorse a new cryptocurrency, she literally just says: "It's the same thing Reese Witherspoon did with Ethereum."

But one central pleasure of Evil is that you never know when the next scene will cut to the episode's assessment A-plot, or to one of the main character's ongoing plot threads, or to some ambient other bit of weirdness. Kristen's daughters (played wonderfully by Brooklyn Shuck, Skylar Gray, Maddy Crocco, and Dalya Knapp) might find themselves playing a creepy online game, or freaking out over trains. The season's most spine-tingling subplot is about something going on in the pipes at Kristen's house. Ben swings by to help with the plumbing — and sees an eyeball floating in the toilet. Mandvi's exhausted reaction is priceless. "I try to figure out these cases that don't make any sense," he moans, "and then we just move on to the next thing."

Actually, Evil 's third season digs deep into its own history. Old cases pop up in unexpected ways. The most one-off-iest subplot suddenly reveals a massive part of the show's mythology. There's a part of me that worries about Evil 's evolution toward greater serialization, but the scripts successfully tee up big revelations even as the central mysteries get more confounding. David is now Father David, a jobbing holy man worn down by ill-attended 6 a.m. masses and repetitive confessions. His visions are getting more frequent, but he's not sure how much to trust them. "How do you know it's God that's helping you," he asks Sister Andrea, "and not someone or something else?"

Evil is one of my favorite shows. I have to admit, though, I greet every episode with David-like doubts. How can any drama sustain this much enthusiastic strangeness? How long can the show ride the razor of questionable reality, with so many events that are either definitely supernatural or immediately explainable? But there's so much sheer acting talent and narrative trickery built into every episode. Colter remains impossibly charming as a decent person whose spiritual confidence masks profound insecurities. Herbers is a dream of witty toughness and parental anxiety, balancing daily concerns about her children with curiosity about the bizarre world her cases open up. Emerson keeps layering Leland's god-of-carnage self-absorption with pitiable impotence, so it's genuinely hard to tell if he's a mastermind or a grasping pawn. So many horrible things keep happening on Evil , yet everyone always seems to be having fun. Joy this nasty is positively blasphemous. A

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• Evil season 3 promises to be as unsettling as ever
• Evil bosses on making that silent episode

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Evil Reviews

It's a handsomely mounted film that's very cinematic with its visual styling.... And in its lead, model and actor Wilson, Evil has a charismatic and strappingly handsome protagonist.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 24, 2019

A powerful tale of boarding school repression based on a novel written by a Swede very much in the Stieg Larsson mold.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2012

On the surface it seems very familiar ... and not altogether inaccessible to American audiences, but it also has the depth and substance we expect from our imports.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 17, 2007

Powerful film where the transformation is painful to watch, but leaves you feeling hope. It took me by surprise at several turns and stayed with me long after the final credits rolled.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 11, 2006

Add the mystique of a foreign language, and suddenly the U.S. considers it an art film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 28, 2006

The narrative has the same familiarity as the setting as Erik has to fight forces bigger than himself, giving the audience a story that justifies (and, not so secretly, revels in) its violence. Call it Fight Club at a boarding school.

Full Review | Jun 11, 2006

Extremely watchable, even if it never goes as deep as it should.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 5, 2006

The second half of 'Evil' takes this genre into new and challenging territory.

Full Review | Apr 12, 2006

Hafstrm's dramatic sense is ... pedestrian and snail's-pace obvious.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Apr 1, 2006

Movies like Evil entertain us by serving sweet revenge on a platter, and director Mikael Hfstrm manipulates emotions more intelligently than most.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 31, 2006

Wilson, who plays Erik, had never been in a film before Evil -- which was nominated for a best foreign-language Oscar in 2004 -- and there's no reason that he can't make many more of them.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2006

Its stuffy, private-school scenes nearly turn the whole thing into The Dead Pugilist's Society, but this Swedish import does have its chilling moments.

Director Mikael Hfstrom exudes no subtlety and lets the blood flow, at odds with the nonviolent moral message this Oscar-nominated film aims to deliver.

A commentary on the troubling gray area between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence, especially where the molding of boys into 'real men' is concerned.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2006

Solid enough, its main flaw is a sense of restraint -- it never quite ventures into the surreal darkness of the obviously comparable If...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 25, 2006

Director Mikael Hafstrom demonstrates a sure hand with the material and is definitely a talent to keep an eye on.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 24, 2006

The way it plays out, Evil feeds the audience's bloodlust as much as it decries the worst acts of its characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 23, 2006

So unsubtle as to verge on the comical ... this didactic drama is set safely in the past and says nothing about the culture of conformity at all costs that hasn't been said before.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 10, 2006

While it's sometimes obvious, Hafstrom's film is so emotionally satisfying on a gut level -- like Rebel Without a Cause -- that it holds you from start to finish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 10, 2006

Hafstrom ... keeps us guessing as he confidently builds suspense.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A skeptical clinical psychologist joins a priest-in-training and a blue collar contractor as they investigate supposed abnormal events, including, demonic possession, and other extraordinary... Read all A skeptical clinical psychologist joins a priest-in-training and a blue collar contractor as they investigate supposed abnormal events, including, demonic possession, and other extraordinary occurrences to see if there's a scientific explanation or if something truly supernatural... Read all A skeptical clinical psychologist joins a priest-in-training and a blue collar contractor as they investigate supposed abnormal events, including, demonic possession, and other extraordinary occurrences to see if there's a scientific explanation or if something truly supernatural's at work.

• Michelle King
• Robert King
• Katja Herbers
• Mike Colter
• Aasif Mandvi
• 832 User reviews
• 22 Critic reviews
• 3 wins & 43 nominations

Episodes 50

• Kristen Bouchard

• David Acosta

• Lexis Bouchard

• Leland Townsend

• Lynn Bouchard

• Lila Bouchard

• Laura Bouchard

• Sheryl Luria

• Dr. Kurt Boggs

• Sister Andrea

• Andy Bouchard

• Monsignor Matthew Korecki

• Karima Shakir

• Bishop Thomas Marx

• Father Frank Ignatius …

• Victor LeConte
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The sole piece of art hanging in Leland Townsend's otherwise white on white office is a painting by David Acosta's father Leon.
• Connections Referenced in Half in the Bag: 2022 Catch-up Part 2 (2023)

User reviews 832

• Jun 19, 2022

IMDb's 2024 TV Guide

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• September 26, 2019 (United States)
• United States
• New York, USA
• King Size Productions
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Review: The Origin of Evil

by  David Katz

01/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: In Sébastien Marnier’s rococo suspense piece, Laure Calamy seeks to join a family of French Trumps

It’s a welcome thing at a major festival, even as they’ve generally increased their haul of genre pictures, however elevated or artsy of a variety: a trashy and tawdry thriller that reels you in, disarming your critical faculties. Sébastien Marnier ’s The Origin of Evil   [ + see also: trailer film profile ] feels like the sort of movie you might’ve caught half-asleep on late-night TV in the pre-streaming age, perhaps after having missed the first 15 minutes – forcing you to stay glued until the very end, drooping eyelids be damned. Or, to be less flattering, it feels like the kind of brisk, undemanding, back-of-the-seat entertainment that might make a few hours of a long-haul flight melt away.

Returning to the Venice Film Festival ’s specially created genre and audience-friendly film sidebar, this time called Orizzonti Extra after School’s Out   [ + see also: film review trailer interview: Sébastien Marnier film profile ] from 2018 was in Sconfini, The Origin of Evil could be described as a “frothy thriller”, and while Hitchcock and (later) François Ozon sometimes specialised in these, Marnier’s work here can’t quite vault over the clashing nature of that descriptor. Another element it has in common with other French thrillers is quite a casual attitude to pastiche and quotation, where lifts are hard to distinguish from outright steals; the script suspiciously corresponds to various design and plot elements of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out , although the crueller and more anti-humanist direction that Marnier ends up taking us in leaves a more lasting aftertaste.

Laure Calamy , one of the sparkiest French actors currently working, is the slippery Stéphane, a line worker at a fish-processing plant with her eye on upward mobility. The early stages of the plot, which is important not to fully reveal for prospective viewers, shows her alternating between caring for her incarcerated and unstable girlfriend ( Suzanne Clément ) and making cautious inroads into her newly discovered biological family, after discovering her father’s identity at the film’s beginning. In a very felicitous burst of fortune, Serge ( Jacques Weber ), this patriarch, is a local property tycoon, with a chain of hotels emblazoned with his name as well (you can feel Marnier nudging you in the tummy, almost with a 3D elbow coming out of the cinema screen); he and Stéphane even initially meet at what looks like a golf-course clubhouse.

Once at his garishly nouveau-riche residence, Stéphane has to navigate a frosty introduction to his daughter George ( Doria Tiller ) – who is gradually taking over his empire and literally says to her face, “You’re not wanted here” – and his vain and haughty spouse, Louise ( Dominique Blanc ). Blanc’s insouciant turn helps her character become as much of an audience identification point as Stéphane, upending the sexist “gold digger” archetype and twisting it into her own way of taking gleeful advantage of the filthy rich.

Titling the film The Origin of Evil is an unconvincing feint: it asks us to derive a moral stance from how the tale sees its characters, when what we see before us is so obviously cynically pessimistic about human nature. And as we learn more about what’s motivating Stéphane, despite Calamy’s considerable efforts, the characterisation as written on the page doesn’t let her sufficiently act out, and thus convince in, her volatile changes of heart. Marnier is aiming to concoct something close to Chabrol’s La Cérémonie here, but stirs in Splenda when what’s really needed is arsenic.

The Origin of Evil is a co-production between France and Canada, staged by Avenue B Productions and Micro_scope. Its world sales are handled by Charades .

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'Evil Does Not Exist' — or does it? — in this mysterious Japanese eco-drama

Justin Chang

Ryô Nishikawa plays Hana in Evil Does Not Exist. via Janus Films hide caption

Ryô Nishikawa plays Hana in Evil Does Not Exist.

What do you do after you've directed a talky, three-hour Japanese drama that became a critics' darling and major arthouse hit and received four Oscar nominations, winning one for best international feature?

If you're Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the gifted 45-year-old filmmaker behind Drive My Car , you step back and go for a long walk in the woods, in search of fresh air and new ideas.

The result is a mesmerizing new movie, Evil Does Not Exist , that leaves behind the mostly urban settings of Hamaguchi's earlier films like Happy Hour and Asako I & II . It takes place in a rural village within driving distance of Tokyo, that's home to a close-knit community of about 6,000 people.

'Drive My Car' may be the most absorbing ride you take all year

The first two characters we meet are a young girl named Hana and her single dad, Takumi, a woodcutter who knows the surrounding forest better than most. The movie sets a gently pastoral rhythm, following father and daughter as they walk through the woods, identifying trees and other plants and stumbling on the occasional dead deer.

Takumi, wonderfully played by Hitoshi Omika, knows that their presence here is disruptive, but he and his fellow residents do strive to be good, responsible stewards of the land. And so they're incensed when they learn that a company is planning to build a glamping resort in the area, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences.

And so Evil Does Not Exist begins as a kind of ecological parable, pitting townsfolk against corporate developers. The centerpiece is a brilliantly written and acted sequence in which the company reps meet with the locals, promising that the campsite will bring tourists and boost their economy.

But the locals aren't fools, and one by one, they raise issues, from the risk of wildfires from BBQ pits to the septic tank that will pollute the town's water supply. The sequence has some of the texture of a Frederick Wiseman documentary , and it's similarly skilled at turning a slideshow presentation in a community center into the stuff of engrossing drama.

There's a turning point in the story when one of the company reps — Takahashi, played by the actor Ryûji Kosaka — seems to fall under the spell of this wooded region and even fantasizes about moving here. For a while it looks like the movie might be the story of a city mouse turning country mouse.

But nothing about Evil Does Not Exist turns out to be predictable. As he's done before, Hamaguchi gives us characters who are too complicated and richly drawn to be reduced to any one type. Yet that doesn't explain how hauntingly different this movie feels from his other work.

It's more sparsely written and more unsettling in tone. The musical score, composed by Eiko Ishibashi, is both lush and ominous, and it often cuts off abruptly, to disorienting effect. The outdoor scenery is shot with a crystalline beauty, but the longer you watch, the more sinister the imagery becomes. At times Hamaguchi positions the camera at ground level looking up, as if to show us the perspective of the earth itself. In these moments, the human characters suddenly look strangely alien, like the interlopers they are.

I've seen Evil Does Not Exist a few times now, and each time it's held me rapt, only to leave me feeling profoundly unnerved. Much of that has to do with the ending, which is confounding in ways that have already generated a lot of debate. I'm still wrestling with the ending myself and what it says about the human compulsion to dominate one's environment. I'm also still getting a handle on the title. It's as if Hamaguchi is trying to get us to look at the natural world, human beings included, beyond the comforting framework of good vs. evil.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Takumi, whom Omika plays with an inscrutability that both frightens you and draws you in. He may be a loving father and caretaker of the land, but Takahashi misreads him at his own peril. It's the two lead actors' performances that keep you watching through the shattering final moments. Whether or not evil exists, I'm glad a movie this mysterious and powerful does.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Colors of Evil: Red’ on Netflix, A Polish Thriller About A Mother’s Search For Answers In Her Daughter’s Murder

Where to stream:.

• Colors of Evil: Red

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Stream it or skip it: ‘red swan’ on hulu, about revenge, marriages of convenience, and a woman falling for her bodyguard, stream it or skip it: ‘the killer inside: the ruth finley story’ on lifetime, where a wichita woman’s traumas affect the btk killer investigation, stream it or skip it: ‘savage beauty’ season 2 on netflix, where zinhle is on the run, while don tries to keep control of bhengu beauty.

Colors of Evil: Red , now streaming on Netflix, is adapted from Kolory Zła: Czerwień , the first novel in a popular three-book series by Polish author Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. When a young woman is murdered in the coastal Baltic region of Poland, her mother, a prominent judge, teams with a prosecutor new to the area to discover what really happened. Because there are lots of questions that could seemingly be answered by the piles of evidence that nobody else is investigating. Colors of Evil: Red , directed by Adrian Panek and written by Panek and Łukasz M. Maciejewski, stars Maja Ostaszewski ( Broad Peak ), Jakub Gierszał ( The Getaway King ), and Zofia Jastrzębska ( Infamy ).      

COLORS OF EVIL: RED : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: When the manager of a Gdynia nightclub called Shipwreck asks why he should hire her as his new bartender, Monika (Jastrzębska) just says it’s because guys will line up to buy drinks – and drugs – from her. “On their knees.” It’s a bolt of confidence, and pretty soon she’s the club’s most popular attraction. But what she considers a lark – dating the manager, and helping him move party drugs on the side – just as quickly turns tragic. And when Monika’s mutilated body turns up on the beach, it’s up to rookie prosecutor Leopold Bilski (Gierszał) to not only break the bad news to her mother, Judge Helena Bogucka (Ostaszewski), but to try and build a case around Monika’s murder. And that’s damn difficult with his supervisor giving him the runaround and the assigned detectives going out of their way to be unhelpful.

Helena blames herself and her failing marriage to high-powered lawyer Roman (Andrzej Zieliński) for what befell Monika. They should have been more present in the life of their daughter. But the circumstances of her death are particularly grisly, and suggest she was the victim of a psychopath or sadistic serial killer. As Bilski works the case from his end, uncovering similarities between Monika’s murder and the deaths of other young women in Poland’s Tricity region, Helena’s frustrations with Roman boil over into suspicion. As it turns out, he’s listed as the legal counsel for Shipwreck, which is owned (through a shell company, of course) by a powerful local gangster named Łukasz (Przemyslaw Bluszcz). Why was her husband working for a mobster? And did Łukasz have something to do with Monika’s murder? 

Colors of Evil: Red builds in the pace of a police procedural as it moves along, and employs a flashback format that’s at its best when it helps us learn a little more about Monika as a person. There’s also a medical examiner (Andrzej Konopka) whose connection to Helena is more than professional, his creepy son who also knew Monika, and the matter of a red ruby ring, Helena’s mother’s, which Monika always wore in life. Now she’s dead, the ring is missing, nobody’s talking, and if Helena and Bilski aren’t careful, they might be next.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2021 film Operation Hyacinth featured a gritty period setting, solid procedural vibes, and a message in support of the Polish LGBTQ community. And The Plagues of Breslau echoed some of the mystery components and darker elements of the mayhem at work in Colors of Evil: Red .   

Performance Worth Watching: Maja Ostaszewski deserves more screen time in Colors of Evil , but she makes the most of what she has, with a ton of mileage earned from a series of ever more drawn looks. The specifics of Helena’s dissolving marriage to Roman go unspoken, but the mistakes they made are written all over Ostaszewski’s features.    

Memorable Dialogue: It is only in the terrible aftermath of their daughter’s murder that Helena and Roman can finally admit to each other how little they did to help her. “We failed her,” Helena tells him flatly. “We simply failed her.”  

Sex and Skin: Colors of Evil includes disturbing scenes of sexual violence and assault.

Our Take: As awful as Monika’s fate is in Colors of Evil: Red , her cause of death and the condition of her body are the kind of red flags that can signal a satisfying thriller/murder mystery. This film, though, is somewhat less than satisfying. It’s capably directed, and outside of its grim narrative, the shooting locations in Poland are spectacular. But while Helena and Bilski are each driven to solve the crime – justice for Monika, of course, but also because her death could very well be linked to larger patterns of police corruption – the characters are often left to simply react to whatever discoveries they make, and feed that information back into the same foreboding cul-de-sac. We go round and round with their investigation as they uncover bits of evidence and other intriguing morsels, but the fact is that what they uncover felt pretty obvious from the get-go. We want to root for them, and see that true justice gets done. But the payoffs in Colors of Evil: Red are too clear by far, and a couple of late twists make the whole thing feel protracted even further.    

Our Call: Skip It. Colors of Red: Evil is structurally sound as a thriller, and it includes a handful of good performances. But the primary colors of its plot bleed through too early for the suspense to really build.

Johnny Loftus ( @glennganges ) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.   

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'Longlegs' Review: It’s Maika Monroe vs. Nicolas Cage in a Horror Journey of Pure Evil

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The Big Picture

• Longlegs is a horror thriller that puts the audience in a state of uncertainty, similar to the main character's experience.
• The film follows FBI agent Lee Harker as she tries to solve a series of mysterious murders connected to a shadowy figure called Longlegs.
• Director Osgood Perkins effectively builds tension and keeps the audience engaged with his unique storytelling approach.

Halfway through Longlegs , the eerie horror-thriller written and directed by Osgood Perkins ( The Blackcoat’s Daughter , Gretel & Hansel ), we meet a girl who has just awoken from a catatonic state years after a traumatic incident. When asked what this experience was like, the girl states it’s like being “between here and there,” a limbo of sorts, a place that is nowhere, a gray middle ground. What makes Longlegs such an effective horror film—easily one of the best so far this year—is Perkins' ability to put the audience in a similar state of uncertainty. This is the type of mystery we’ve seen plenty of times before, with comparisons to Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs easy to make. However, this time, it comes with an added layer of evil hovering over the experience. We know this type of story, but under Perkins’ supervision, it’s impossible to get our bearings. Even as it unfolds and we’re given all the clues and suspects, we struggle to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense, turning this into an uncomfortable, jarring experience that is unsettling from beginning to end.

A chilling horror thriller directed by Osgood Perkins. The film stars Maika Monroe as Lee Harker, a promising new FBI agent assigned to solve the mystery of an elusive serial killer played by Nicolas Cage. As Harker delves deeper into the case, she uncovers disturbing evidence of occult practices connected to the murders.

What Is 'Longlegs' About?

Also struggling with this feeling of uncertainty is Lee Harker ( Maika Monroe ), an FBI agent assigned to help out on a serial killer case. Harker is described as “half-psychic,” as sometimes she has premonitions that she can’t explain. A series of killings has plagued Oregon for years, as ten families have been found dead in their homes, murdered by their fathers without any known explanation. The suspect is a person known as Longlegs, who has left a birthday card at each of the crime scenes, filled with Zodiac -like messages. Yet no one knows who Longlegs is, how he is making the killings happen, or if he is even at the scene of the crime when these murders occur. All the FBI seems to know is that these dead families are seemingly tied to Longlegs with no discernible explanation.

But while this case has been cold for some time, Harker’s involvement seems to be moving things forward finally. When Longlegs leaves a birthday card at her home, she quickly figures out his cryptic code, and she easily finds patterns within these murders that her boss, Agent Carter ( Blair Underwood ), and the rest of the team had never noticed before. With Harker on the case, it seems like the FBI is closer than ever to catching Longlegs, yet it’s the details, the why and the how, that don’t make any sense as the search finally comes together.

Osgood Perkins Finds Just the Right Tone for This Nightmarish Serial Killer Story

Perkins does a brilliant job of putting the audience in the shoes of Harker, as we feel the frustration that she feels as she tries to gather all the clues . This is a murder mystery where we’re immediately told who the killer is, as the first scene introduces us to a terrifyingly strange Nicolas Cage , who is presented as Longlegs. Immediately, we're shown who we’re searching for, which is an odd person who looks like if Pennywise was really into ’70s rock. We know how these families are being killed, but it’s how these two are put together that eludes both Harker and us—even when we occasionally seem to be a step ahead of her investigation.

It’s that feeling that something isn't right that permeates Perkins’ film and makes it so effective. For the majority of Longlegs , Perkins presents us with medium or long shots, so that we can look over the scene along with Harker as she seeks clues in the darkness or for something that could potentially step out of the shadows at any moment. The ominous cinematography by Andres Arochi seeps into our skin even in the simplest shots, creating a lingering sense of evil that we just can’t shake. We’re on the case too, but we’re ultimately coming up as empty-handed in regard to answers as Harker is. By presenting all this empty space in the frame, Perkins gives us the feeling that something evil is right out of sight, watching, ready to attack. Because of this approach, Longlegs builds a tension that doesn’t break, making for a "scary" film that is rarely actually scary and is instead about a rising worry that is frequently unnerving to watch.

'Longlegs' Takes Time Finding the Right Method to Its Madness

Yet it takes a bit for Longlegs to settle into its own style. This is a slow burn of a film, told in three chapters, and like the mystery itself, it feels as though Longlegs doesn’t entirely come together until that final chapter. Especially in that first chapter, with some quick cuts and some jerky scares thrown on the screen, it can feel more like a horror-themed TikTok channel than the horror work of Jonathan Demme or David Fincher . Again, in that first scene where we meet Longlegs, the scene cuts out, trying to pull the rug out from the audience right away, before presenting its opening credits that expand onto the screen, intercut with strange imagery to make everyone feel uneasy. Here and there, Longlegs relies on thin scares like that, and it’s never quite as effective as the simmering tension Perkins effectively sets up later. It’s in more conventional scares and attempts to jolt the audience—especially in the first half of the film—where Longlegs is trying to provoke, but is rarely ever provocative.

Monroe, Cage, and Underwood Make This Mystery Come Together

While it can often feel like a spin on murder mysteries we’ve seen before, Longlegs also does excellent work at crafting characters who are similarly skewed versions of the type of characters we’d see in those types of movies. After performances in films like It Follows and Watcher , Maika Monroe once more shows her brilliance in horror. Her role as Agent Harker is extremely insular, as neither she nor we understand her “gifts,” and so much of this performance relies on her uncertainty as to what’s going on in this case and within herself. Monroe is restrained and ill at ease, and in following a character like that for most of the film, we also start to feel her apprehension and worry.

Blair Underwood’s Agent Carter is more like the agent we expect to see in a murder thriller like this, full of clichés and slightly funny one-liners. Yet he’s a conventional cop thrown into an unconventional mystery without easy answers, which again, plays to the idea that things aren’t the way they should be. We’ve seen this character in straightforward films, and this is surely not where he belongs. Alicia Witt is also almost unrecognizable as Harker’s mother, Ruth, who seems like a worrying mother type over the phone at first, then slowly becomes something far more compelling once we meet her. It’s a small role, but it’s an unforgettable one as well.

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And then, there’s Nicolas Cage as Longlegs. Much like his recent work in films like Dream Scenario , Mandy , and Pig , Longlegs knows exactly how to use Cage and his ability to equally handle the quiet as well as the bombastic. This is a flamboyant and strange character who, thankfully, Perkins doles out conservatively. We don’t need much of Longlegs to feel his impact on this story, and Perkins rarely shows him full-on, often hiding his face with the frame, his own hands, or by showing him from a distance. A little bit of Longlegs goes a long way—understandably so—but Cage finds just the right way to play this twisted, odd individual in a way that feels both otherworldly and disturbingly grounded in nightmare fuel.

Even though Longlegs eventually finds its, ahem, legs, in the slow-burn mystery filled with uncertainty, it’s in that third chapter where the film truly comes together. As the answers start flowing and the true nature of this evil becomes clear, that knowledge only makes the story here even more terrifying. Making us uncomfortable through unpredictability is one thing, but keeping this horror story just as effective once we see the truth is even more important. Perkins manages to make the truth just as upsetting as whatever we had conjured up in our minds, a satisfying payoff that almost makes you want to watch it again immediately to see the story altogether—if you could handle a Longlegs double feature. While Perkins has made horror films prior to Longlegs , this feels like him truly finding his lane in the genre. It's an uneasy, unrelenting nightmare that we can’t escape, even if it is a rocky road for a bit. Longlegs takes a bit to get us settled into its brand of horror, but once it does, it’s hard not to be impressed by the place between here and there where we find ourselves.

Longlegs is a jarring horror vision from Osgood Perkins, an unsettling tale that takes a bit to find its legs, but ultimately works its way into a satisfying nightmare.

• Osgood Perkins' direction makes nearly every scene uncomfortable.
• The uncertainty of the mystery at hand is just as unnerving as the more straightforward horror moments.
• The cast, which includes Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, is excellent at playing off well-known tropes in similar mystery thrillers.
• Longlegs takes a bit to find its footing, with the first two acts relying too much on shocks that don't often work.

Longlegs comes to theaters in the U.S. on July 12. Click below for showtimes near you.

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‘longlegs’ review: maika monroe and nicolas cage in a mesmerizing serial killer chiller that burns with satanic power.

Writer-director Osgood Perkins spins a tense FBI procedural steeped in occult horror and nightmarish visions, also starring Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Maika monroe talks fighting for 'longlegs,' why she nearly gave up acting and 'it follows 2', 'longlegs' director says nicolas cage stayed "very focused" on character between takes but without "any sort of method-acting bull****".

The full extent of that horror is revealed to be alarmingly close to home for Maika Monroe ‘s Agent Lee Harker, who first encountered Longlegs when she was a child, 25 years earlier.

In that attention-grabbing prologue — unfolding a day before the ninth birthday of the young Lee (Lauren Acala) and shown in snug 4:3 aspect ratio with the rounded corners of an old home movie — Perkins adopts the Jaws principle of giving the audience only an unsettling partial glimpse of the monster without being able to form a full picture. What does stay with us is the voice — a fluttery quasi-falsetto of indeterminate gender — as the stranger approaches Lee in the snowy grounds outside her isolated home.

A Bureau psych evaluation finds Harker to have heightened intuitive abilities, prompting her boss, Agent Carter ( Blair Underwood ), to make her a key member of the investigative team on the murders. Ten houses and ten different families have been hit, with husbands killing wives and children before taking their own lives, using weapons that were already in the house. There are no signs of forced entry or outsider DNA but at the scene of each crime, a note is left behind, written in code and signed “Longlegs.”

As Lee pores over case files and graphic crime-scene photographs, she makes the connection that all the families had daughters whose birthdays fell on the 14th of any given month. She keeps some of her findings to herself, not mentioning to Carter the figure she sees watching her from the woods outside her house, or the cryptic note she later finds on her desk, which helps her crack the code.

Even before Lee’s mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), urges her daughter to keep saying her prayers to protect her from evil, Perkins has begun insinuating hints of religious horror into the film’s hallucinatory mood. When the killings are traced back to a farm family in 1966, whose sole survivor ( Kiernan Shipka in a chilling extended cameo) is in a psychiatric institution, it emerges that the elusive Longlegs is a devil worshipper and a dollmaker.

There’s also the fear that Harker, whose heavily medicated mother suggests a family history of mental instability, might be susceptible to the subliminal influences that appear to be part of the killer’s method. This is gripping stuff that steadily cranks up its nightmarish feeling of dread. Even if the identity of the family that will lead to a conclusive break in the case is telegraphed way too early, the movie continues to work its way under your skin for the duration.

Perkins’ stroke of genius is waiting more than 40 minutes before giving us full visual access to Cage’s Longlegs, whose look is signaled by the lyrics from the pervy T. Rex banger “Get It On” that appear as text on the screen at the start: “Well you’re slim and you’re weak / You’ve got the teeth of the hydra upon you / You’re dirty, sweet and you’re my girl.”

Virtually unrecognizable under heavy facial prosthetics, Cage is like a cross between Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim, a gone-to-seed glam rock casualty with a mop of straggly silver hair, pasty skin and smeared traces of eye makeup and lipstick. That aspect finds sly echoes in album-cover shots of T. Rex’s The Slider and Lou Reed’s Transformer . The weird sing-song voice Cage adopts, often on the brink of hysteria, is unnerving enough, but his physical presence is something else entirely. His mentions of “My friend downstairs” will send shivers down your spine.

Perkins takes his cue from the interviews between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs , and the face-to-face confrontation of Lee with Longlegs doesn’t disappoint. It also opens a path for the murder investigation to veer in another direction, one that heightens Lee’s already off-the-charts anxiety levels.

Underwood brings gravitas but also family-man affability to Carter, allowing him to gain the trust of wary Harker, while Witt takes her mother Ruth from semi-absent and mildly off-kilter to messed-up beyond repair.

As much as the actors, what gives Longlegs its cursed power is the shivery atmosphere of Andrés Arochi Tinajero’s cinematography, often shooting through doorways or windows that frame our view from insidious angles. Eugenio Battaglia’s dense sound design is another big plus, dialing up jump scares derived from music or other sonic cues rather than leaning on the usual visual tricks. At 101 minutes divided into three chapters, the movie is tautly paced, making deft use of the shifting aspect ratios between past and present and of an eerie score.  

Perkins has traveled down sinister roads before, in his 2015 feature debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter , in his more uneven follow-up, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House , and in his 2020 contribution to the subgenre of gruesomely reimagined fairy tales, Gretel & Hansel . It might be argued that he stirs too many elements into the mix here — crime procedural, occult mystery, mind manipulation, Satanic worship, scary dolls, a Faustian bargain and a “nun” not fit for any convent. But Longlegs is his most fully realized and relentlessly effective film to date.

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Evil Recap: Demon Detected

You can’t trust Sheryl Lauria for much, but you can trust her to keep her promises regarding her granddaughters. Sorry, Leland, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal, but the woman did tell you back when things first started that if you tried to come for one of the girls she would cut your dick off. You don’t make that kind of threat lightly! This is why we pick up right where we left off last week, with Leland returning home to find the place ripped apart, the blood-written threat on the floor, and Sheryl sitting in wait, knife in hand.

Leland only starts to take Sheryl’s threats seriously when she informs him that save for some bottles she took for herself, she destroyed his entire stock of that youth-transfusion goo. Apparently, if they don’t take it they’ll age 20 years in 20 days. It sounds gross, but also I would like to see that. Both Sheryl and Leland stab each other. Like, really, really stab each other. “Too bad you’re a little short down there,” Sheryl laments, unable to go all the way with her promise before she heads over to Kristen’s for help and winds up in the hospital. Both Sheryl and Leland survive their wounds, but wow , is it so on. There is no way both of them will survive this, and by the way Sheryl is tearfully telling her daughter that she’ll “earn [her] trust back,” I’m worried about her. Regardless, it’s fun to see Sheryl and Leland finally up the ante on their demented relationship. What a joy to watch these two stab one another!

Things are escalating everywhere, which is no surprise since, and I’m very sorry to say this but, we’re entering the back half of the season. Things are especially escalating over at the Bouchard residence which this week we learn has a literal path to Hell underneath it. Now, I learned everything I know about real estate from Selling Sunset , but I’m sure this feature will up its resale value.

How do we come to such a discovery? Well, if we’re being honest, we should’ve seen it coming since there is that giant hole in the basement wall that no one has ever explained, and that’s on us. But thanks to a haunted train engineer, we find out anyway.

This poor guy! The assessors are tasked with helping a train engineer who believes he’s been seeing ghosts on his route. He tells them this awful story about the amount of people he’s had to watch kill themselves on the tracks and not be able to do anything to stop it — by the time he sees them, it’s usually too late. The latest death, a girl in her prom dress, keeps returning to the same spot and now he sees her appear and then get dragged away by something scary. This whole scene is gutting. Jefferson White, who plays the engineer, is so great here — Evil really does get some great actors to come in and play for an episode, don’t they? — everything about him is screaming haunted . The air around him feels heavier. Has our team ever been so quietly traumatized just listening to a victim’s story? His “it’s terrible, it’s terrible to kill someone” will, well, haunt me!!

It’s David and Ben who wind up taking a ride on the train that evening, and our engineer once again sees the ghost in the same spot, a section of track he calls “the Death Stretch.” David and Ben don’t see it, but when they get out to investigate, they find two very interesting things. First, David spots a horned demon — definitely could be the scary thing dragging the prom ghost off. Second, when the demon runs away from them, jumping off the bridge they’re on, the guys look down and realize they are standing right above Kristen’s house. The reveal that Kristen lives directly under “the Death Stretch,” I wanted to slow clap for that reveal. After they find some claw marks down the side of the bridge leading into Kristen’s backyard, David wants to assess her entire house. While Kristen is staunchly against it, her daughters overhear the conversation. They do their own investigating via a Demon Tracker app and immediately run into some sort of being that informs them that, yes, it would like to harm them. Suffice it to say, the Bouchard girls beg their mother for an exorcism on their house, and that’s probably the fifth weirdest sentence I’m going to have to write in this recap.

An exorcism — or “minor exorcism,” as Kristen calls it — it is. At Lynn’s request, now that her sister narced on her and her secret meetings with Sister Andrea, Sister Andrea is joining David in the ceremony to cleanse the house, too. She finds some remnants of Tommy, the Grief Demon, still in Kristen’s bathroom, although he doesn’t show up (#WheresTommy). However, the biggest discovery is down in the basement. In the hole! Kristen explains that the hole was just there when they bought the house. A contractor was supposed to fill it in, but he never did, and they just let it go all this time. Wild, if true.

Sister Andrea doesn’t hesitate to climb in and what she finds is much stranger than a colony of bats. She follows a long trail deeper and deeper until she comes upon the horned demon from the train tracks. He’s Lou and Sister Andrea’s holy water and crucifixes and prayers won’t work on him down here. He doesn’t exactly say that, yes, this is a path to Hell, but it sure seems like one. He has more power here than our demon-fighting nun; he grabs her wrist and it burns . This house is under attack, Sister Andrea tells Kristen. She isn’t leaving until they block up that hole. Ben leaves to grab some bricks from the rectory to do it that night; Sister Andrea isn’t messing around. She watches guard — Lou is more susceptible to her power outside of the tunnel, so he stays put, relegated to making fart noises while Sister Andrea does her thing — until the Bouchards are safe. The assessors find out not long after that the patch has solved our sad train engineer’s haunting problem, too. Good for him! Well, I guess he’s still forced to watch people kill themselves on train tracks, but it … feels almost like a win? Maybe?

The thing is, the hole to the path to Hell might be patched up, but the demons who were using that path are now all hanging outside of the house. Late one night, Lexis takes the Demon Hunter app out to the backyard and suddenly dozens of those demon spirits appear. The Bouchard house isn’t safe just yet.

The Bouchards aren’t the only ones with a tougher fight ahead of them. Poor Ben! His, uh, brain situation is only getting worse. He’s seeing and hearing the jinn, he’s getting massive migraines, and he is blacking out for huge parts of his day. He doesn’t remember asking Renée to move in with him, he doesn’t remember a call he made telling her he was picking up scented candles (he doesn’t have this call on his phone either, suspicious!), and he definitely doesn’t remember sending her a video of him singing “Baby Come Back” and begging her to stay. I, on the other hand, will remember that forever.

But what’s happening to Ben is alarming in ways we’re only just diving into. This man of science is now questioning his very reality. He has no scientific explanation for what’s happening to him. More than that, through this job, especially in the past few months, he’s seen more and more that he can’t explain. His world crumbles even further during a conversation with his sister Karima about their parents. Ben remembers his dad having migraines, too, and he asks his sister what he did to get rid of them. Karima has to break some bad news: Their dad was cheating on their mom for years, and he used migraines as an excuse to get out of the house. When their mother died, the migraines stopped altogether. Here he is, questioning his reality once again, in a different, deeply personal way.

His conversation with Kristen during the exorcism shows just how much all of this is messing with him. Ben is struggling. “I thought I knew what I believed, what I wanted,” he tells her. Instead, he is overwhelmed with how much “life is a fucking mystery.” He’s overwhelmed by the immense evil he sees taking hold in this world; There’s no scientific explanation for that either. Realizing he might have had so many things wrong, realizing he can’t find all the answers he wants in science is throwing Ben.

He seems deeply depressed by what’s happening, but does his final conversation with Renée point to a less cynical outcome for the guy? He’s completely confused by the Ben in the video Renée shows him. That guy is nothing like him. He is open and vulnerable. In an unexpected moment, Ben tells Renée that maybe he could learn to be more like the other Ben. He clearly sees something in this other version of himself that he wishes he had. It’s such a powerful character moment. In another surprising moment, Renée turns him down — that’s some really sound decision-making coming from the woman who runs a cult. I mean, I love Ben, but let’s maybe not be dating the man who is blacking out and blaming it on a jinn, even if it may be true. Especially if it may be true! Leave helping Ben to the experts. (David and Kristen, obviously, do you even know me?)

Church Bulletin

• Kristen’s conversation with Sister Andrea about Lynn is so lovely. Kristen admits she would be heartbroken to watch her smart, caring, all-star of a daughter choose a life where she is relegated to mopping floors for men. (A shout-out to Fenna and the silent monastery episode is always welcome!) Sister Andrea eases some of Kristen’s fears: She isn’t there to convince or persuade Lynn to become a nun; she just wants to answer her questions honestly — and she’ll answer any Kristen has, too. I think they’re bonding!

• “It’s like I’m right back in Catholic school. A nun tells me what to do, and I fucking do it.”

• Kristen, when she learns about what her daughters have been up to, including Laura dabbling in some chewing tobacco at school: “What happened to my daughters? Since when have they become demented longshoremen?”

• Another delicious moment in Leland and Sheryl’s feud: As Leland tries to bandage his wound, Timmy is screaming, but when he goes to play the recordings of Kristen’s therapy sessions, he finds that they’ve all been deleted. Michael Emerson is just over here absolutely eating up his “YOU BITCH!”

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‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ Review: Musical Adaptation is a Promising, Boldly Unconventional Retelling Anchored by Standout Performances

By Steven Oxman

Steven Oxman

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But Jim doesn’t remain the lone host for long, nor is the nostalgia allowed to linger.  Ghee enters quickly as the competing co-host, promising the writer (remember, that’s us!) a different take: “I got lots of secrets here.  I’ll tell ‘em!/Hundred fifty years of ghosts, just smell ‘em! If your favorite aunt is Antebellum,/What a lovely place to die!”

And Hewitt, as the eventual criminal defendant of what, in the original version, was part suspenseful legal thriller, delivers a properly complex Jim Williams, in a love-hate relationship with the young Danny Hansford (an excellent Austin Colby), whom he shoots, possibly in self-defense. Hewitt has some amazing highs here, particularly as Jim is quite literally haunted by Danny – his song about Danny and his beloved Camaro, “What a Ride,” has both a surreal quality and a genuine longing.

But throughout, it seems as if The Lady Chablis, Jim, and possibly Danny, are the only actual characters in a story that became so popular because of its population of eccentrics. Some significant figures are just cut completely, others reduced to a quirk, and others, in the case of the society gossips, turned into a comic chorus: genuinely funny (Sierra Boggess is a hoot as a racist real estate snoot) but also too easy of a punching bag. Yes, it’s expected, and welcome, that the counter-cultural Mac (“A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” “Hir”) is drawn naturally to the outsiders, but for a story that aspires to some depth, the racism of the decaying southern aristocracy shouldn’t be dismissed as just comic relief (particularly when Ghee provides all that relief we need already).

The other major problem here is that the effort to de-centralize the true crime component goes too far, summing up Jim’s four trials with a humorous song and a set of cue cards. There are genuine twists and turns in this tale, and this version of “Midnight” needs some of that to feel like it is more than just lingering. As is, the show has four different endings, and though two are great and two are also good, it’s a symptom that the whole lacks an underlying cohesion.

All that said, there’s real hope that Mac and Brown (“Parade,” “The Last Five Years”) can shape this into an extraordinary piece, given that even with all its raw edges it delivers a lot of satisfaction already and its unique, and modern, take on Savannah does bring currency. Director Rob Ashford has brought the world believably to life, and all the design work here is lovingly detailed and memorable, particularly set designer Christopher Oram’s reduced exterior version of Jim’s house, which becomes a character when other humans don’t. 

Now that Mac has performed his always-expected deconstruction, and Brown has crafted a slew of strong and remarkably varied songs, a touch of restoration of the original characters and storytelling suspense would lift it both artistically and commercially.

Goodman Theatre, Chicago; 856 seats; $175 top.  Opened, reviewed July 8, 2024.  Running time: 2 HOURS, 45 MIN.

• Production: A Goodman Theatre production of a musical in two acts, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, book by Taylor Mac, based on the book by John Berendt.
• Crew: Directed by Rob Ashford; choreography, Tanya Birl-Torres; music direction, Thomas Murray. Sets, Christopher Oram; costumes, Toni-Leslie James; lighting, Neil Austin and Jamie Platt; sound, Jon Weston; vocal and dance arrangements and additional orchestrations, Brown; supervising orchestrator, Doug Besterman; hair and wigs, Matthew Armentrout; production stage manager, Saori Yokoo; stage managers, Jennifer Gregory and Mars Wolfe.
• Cast: J. Harrison Ghee, Tom Hewitt, Sierra Boggess, Lance Roberts, Austin Colby, Bailee Endebrock, Shanel Bailey, Jessica Molaskey, Mary Ernster, McKinley Carter, Brianna Buckley, Maya Bowles, DeMarius Copes, Sean Donovan, Jason Michael Evans, Christopher Kelley, Andre Terrell Malcolm, Jarvis B. Manning, Jr., Wes Olivier, Kayla Marie Shipman, Rory Shirley, Calvin L. Cooper, Daryn Whitney Harrell, Kayla Kennedy, Jake DiMaggio Lopez, Justin Thomas Rivers.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, deliver us from evil.

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Despite a series of jarring jump scares, "Deliver Us From Evil," the latest horror film from " Sinister " director Scott Derrickson , is little more than an ugly collection of tropes stolen from " The Exorcist " and " Seven ." Ostensibly about the importance of family, and Christ-like man-saviors that will do anything to protect their children (and sometimes women),  Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman fixate on the tacky, and tawdry, details of their "based on a true story" exorcism tale and never interrogate their characters' motives beyond stock posturing.

Many of "Deliver Us From Evil"s creative shortcomings result from Derrickson and Boardman's lazy articulation of their film's interest in spiritual doubt and penance. For example, Eric Bana's Sergeant Ralph Sarchie, a haunted member of the New York Police Department, simply knows when bad things are going on around him because he has an intuitive "radar"-like sixth sense. Sarchie's supernatural radar leads him and wise-ass partner Butler ( Joel McHale ) to a string of related domestic abuse cases. In each case, parents abuse their children while a mysterious string-bean of a man ( Sean Harris ) hovers nearby, painting over ominously legible graffiti written entirely in Latin. In each case, rebellious, Sarchie finds that hard-drinking Jesuit priest Father Mendoza ( Edgar Ramirez ) is already on the case, waiting to nudge skeptical Sarchie toward a no-man-is-an-island acceptance of his limitations. These two tough (but fair!) men inevitably team up, but only after more children are threatened, pets are abused, and women are treated like accessories.

Derrickson and Boardman's film is more than just a sympathetic representation of Sarchie's paranoia. If this film were even semi-critical of Sarchie's testimony, it would acknowledge that, in any other context, Sarchie's version of events is " Taxi Driver "-levels of deranged. Instead, whenever he enters victims' homes, we see omnipresent crucifixes, a comically vampish Italian woman, a bloated corpse, creepy basement junk, and enough crumbling fixtures to make Bob Villa cry. The only recognizably human domestic-minded person in this film is Sarchie's wife Jen ( Olivia Munn ), but she's mostly sad that Sarchie's "never here, not even when you're home."

The world of "Deliver Us From Evil" needs a real man to clean up all the messes that demon-possesed, absent fathers have left behind. The film's casual chauvinism is established early on when Derrickson and Boardman make table-setting jokes at the expense of women met by Sarchie and Mendoza. First, there's the stranger that drunkenly hits on Mendoza at his regular bar: "You're sweaty" she gasps before Mendoza wearily remarks that drinking is just like medicine. Then there's Jane (Olivia Horton), the first possessed parent Sarchie stumbles across. When he arrests her, Jane mocks Mendoza by calling him a "specialissssst." Horton hisses this line with such unholy comic vigor that she sounds like a Peter Lorre-esque Gollum pull-string doll. But Jane isn't funny since she's obviously unwell. In this scene, before tragic events later humanize her in the worst way imaginable, Jane is little more than a scary punchline.

Admittedly, there's something inherently fascinating about a mediocre horror film that nakedly insists that women are plot devices, fathers always know best and dead kids are inherently the best way to an audience's heart. But Derrickson and Broadman spend so much time fetishistically focusing on grisly generic junk like an eviscerated cat and a possessed, rolly-polly toy owl that they wind up neglecting even the tropes of their shallow characters. It's not just that "Deliver Us From Evil" is blunt and kind of vile; it's so hysterically incompetent, and mindlessly excessive, that I found myself cheering on a demonic toy that benignly coos "Aa-oo-oo, aa-oo-oo." "Deliver Us From Evil" is scary, but only because it can't even make a possessed stuffed animal creepy.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Rated R for bloody violence, grisly images, terror throughout, and language

118 minutes

Eric Bana as Sarchie

Edgar Ramirez as Mendoza

Olivia Munn as Jen

Chris Coy as Jimmy

Dorian Missick as Gordon

Joel McHale as Butler

• Scott Derrickson
• Paul Harris Boardman

Cinematography

• Scott Kevan

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Team Behind ‘Evil’ and Fans Look To Netflix to Revive Show for Season 6

The series is currently midway through its fourth and fifth season run on Paramount+.

Picture: Paramount+

For those with a Netflix subscription in the United States, the chances are you’ve seen that the CBS-turned-Paramount+ exclusive Evil has been streaming on Netflix. Following a strong debut on the streamer, fans and the team behind the show are looking to Netflix for a potential revival. 

Before we discuss why the show’s team is looking to Netflix for a future revival, we need to add some much-needed context about how we got to this point.

Let’s begin with a quick rundown of Evil itself. Beginning as a CBS series, the show eventually moved to Paramount+ for season 2 onwards. While Netflix did stream the first season for some time in 2020, it wasn’t until early 2024 when we scooped that the series would return to Netflix in the US.

Only the show’s first two seasons were added to Netflix, and it’s unclear whether more seasons will be coming down the track, although we’ve predicted they will . Co-creator of the show Robert King stated he was unsure whether more would arrive. 

Following their addition to Netflix (just in the United States, it’s worth noting), Evil has been featured in the daily Netflix top 10s and in US-specific charts like those from Nielsen and Luminate. 

Season 4 has been airing on Paramount+ weekly since early 2024, and it was initially announced that the show would return for season 5. However, for a few reasons (primarily the Hollywood strikes of 2023), it was announced that the series would end with that shortened fifth season released in 2024 , immediately after season 4 concludes.

Katja Herbers Leads Charge for Netflix Revival of Evil  

Katja Herbers is perhaps the most vocal in rallying fans to get a sixth season on the way. She’s been a vocal advocate of the show and even went as far to correct Collider in how they characterized the cancelation of the series, saying , “To set the record straight on our cancellation: nobody wanted it. Both the Kings & the actors want to do more. I am the one who had the family matter & was thankfully granted to leave with 6 days left to film to go to my father.”

Herbers continued, “A day after I left the show got shut down by the strike. We filmed the remaining 6 days after the strikes ended. Then heard we we were cancelled with 4 additional episodes to wrap up the story. The story will have an ending but also an opening for more. Which is what we all hope!”

Over the past few weeks following Evil’s addition to Netflix, Herbers plus other cast and crew members have been constantly posting about the show’s performance thus far, suggesting that it justifies further seasons. 

Likewise, fans have been taking to social media in hopes of drumming up a renewal, tagging the likes of Netflix, which now makes a natural home for any future potential season. 

Save #Evil !! 👀Lookin’ at you, @netflix ! “The story will have an ending but also an opening for more…Our numbers indicate we could fill a streamers pockets with more seasons…. We’re the second most streamed original show on all platforms and the seventh overall.” 📺💪 https://t.co/ojAx4HSOV0 — Media Melanie | TV Talk (@MediaMelanie) July 8, 2024

#EvilSeries has always been great, but it’s really hitting its stride in it’s amazing 4th season (sound familiar, Enterprise fans?). Such a shame that this beloved, terrific, and TOP-rated show has been cancelled. C’mon, @Netflix !? Please #SaveEvilSeries pic.twitter.com/K2SfiD9H8R — Melanie (@ShuttlepodTwo) July 7, 2024

What are the chances of Netflix reviving the show? It’s not impossible; after all, Netflix has had a history of reviving shows that became popular on its platform, whether that be Manifest or Lucifer , but they are rare. 

Of course, this isn’t the only Robert King and Michelle King series that fans are hoping to see get revived at Netflix either. Your Honor, the two-season Showtime drama featuring Bryan Cranston, also recently burst onto Netflix in the US and debuted to substantial numbers according to Nielsen and Luminate. Fans have been clamoring online for season 3 to be produced on Netflix . 

On the bright side, the Kings have more new series coming down the track, albeit not at Netflix. The duo is hard at work on the second season of their procedural drama Elsbeth, which aired its first season earlier this year. Furthermore, the duo is working with Jennifer Cacicio to bring the 2018 true crime podcast Happy Face  to life on Paramount+ in 2025 , with Dennis Quaid due to lead. 

Now, over to you. Do you think Netflix should pick up season 6 of Evil ? Let us know in the comments.

Founder of What's on Netflix, Kasey has been tracking the comings and goings of the Netflix library for over a decade. Covering everything from new movies, series and games from around the world, Kasey is in charge of covering breaking news, covering all the new additions now available on Netflix and what's coming next.

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Evil Dead's Sam Raimi Is Set To Direct His First Horror Movie In Over A Decade

The director is finally lining up his next film.

Sam Raimi has had an impressive and eclectic career that has seen him contribute to a great number of genres – including crime thrillers, superhero blockbusters, a baseball drama, a western, and more – but his greatest impact has arguably been on the horror genre. He broke into the film industry with the creation of Evil Dead , and he's returned to the scary stuff throughout his career. Sadly, he hasn't directed a straight horror movie since 2009's Drag Me To Hell , but he's now ready to end that streak with his next project.

According to Deadline , Sam Raimi knows what movie he wants to direct as his follow-up to 2021's Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness , and it's a feature titled Send Help . The film being made based on an original screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (the writers of Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 remake of Friday The 13th ), and the story reportedly is set on an island with two principal characters. The trade describes the upcoming horror movie as a cross between Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's Misery and Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away starring Tom Hanks .

In recent years, Sam Raimi has made contributions to the horror genre, but it's been via the small screen or as a producer. He directed the pilot of the terrific series Ash vs. Evil Dead , and also helmed the first three-episode arc of the Quibi series 50 States Of Fright . As a producer, he's not only brought as the last two Evil Dead movies (2013's Evil Dead and 2023's Evil Dead Rise ), but also films like Don't Breathe , Crawl , and Umma .

Send Help is a project that is set up at 20th Century Studios, but it apparently doesn't have a green light to move forward just yet. As such, there are no dates being targeted for either the start of production or release – but the trade report does note that the project is targeting theaters and not streaming.

There are a whole lot of questions about this project that don't presently have answers just yet. For example: if the story is about two characters who ended up stranded alone on an island together, how will Sam Raimi find a way to include a Bruce Campbell cameo ? (Assuming, of course, that he's not going to play one of the leads – which I would absolutely love to see.) Hopefully it won't be too long before generated excitement for Raimi's return to big screen horror gets Send Help the green light and we can start learning more about the film.

As far as other Sam Raimi horror projects are concerned, he has two other films in the genre he has produced that are now on the way, including the woman vs. serial killer thriller Don't Move (which has been picked up by Netflix) and the upcoming movie Locked directed by David Yarovesky ( Brightburn ) and starring Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins .

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Screen Rant

This upcoming horror movie remake is an exciting comeback for one of the last decade's most underrated actors.

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Blumhouse's Speak No Evil Remake Has To Have A Different Ending Twist, Right?

One of john wayne's best performances came in his final ever western movie that reunited him with james stewart, 10 movies twists you would've figured out sooner if you spoke another language.

• Speak No Evil is a horror remake directed by James Watkins, starring Mackenzie Davis.
• Davis, considered one of the most underrated actors of the last decade, returns to horror after The Turning.
• The film offers a chance for Davis to showcase her acting range and gain the recognition she deserves.

One upcoming horror remake is a lot more exciting as it’s the deserved comeback of one of the most underrated actors of the last decade. The horror genre continues to have a great run, though it has faced some backlash for relying too much on sequels and remakes. Still, there are many of both coming up in the near future, and among the remakes to be released in 2024 is Speak No Evil . A remake of the 2022 movie of the same name by Christian Tafdrup, Speak No Evil is directed by James Watkins, and gives a horrifying twist to family vacations.

Speak No Evil follows Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy) who are on vacation with their daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), in Europe. There they meet Paddy (James McAvoy), his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their son Ant (Dan Hough), who invite them to their idyllic country estate for the weekend. Once there, the Daltons gradually realize something dark and disturbing is going on with their new friends. Speak No Evil marks Mackenzie Davis’ return , and hopefully, it will finally give her the recognition she deserves.

Blumhouse just released the trailer for its remake of Speak No Evil. Unfortunately, it looks like it's given away the movie's twist ending.

Mackenzie Davis Is One Of The Last Decade's Most Underrated Actors

Mackenzie davis has starred in some big but flawed projects.

Unfortunately, Davis has been a victim of the failure of her most notable projects, which isn’t a reflection of her talent.

Mackenzie Davis is no newcomer, but she hasn’t gotten the space and recognition she deserves . Davis’ acting career began in 2012 with one episode of the TV series I Just Want My Pants Back and the drama movie Smashed , directed by James Ponsoldt. Some of Davis’ most notable movies are The F Word , That Awkward Moment , and The Martian , but she became best known when she played Mariette in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 , in 2017. On TV, Davis rose to fame with her role as Cameron Howe in Halt and Catch Fire and Yorkie in Black Mirror ’s “San Junipero”.

The F Word , starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, was released in some countries as What If? .

In 2019, Davis starred in Terminator: Dark Fate as Grace Harper , and her last film appearance was as Harper Caldwell in Happiest Season . Unfortunately, Davis has been a victim of the failure of her most notable projects, which isn’t a reflection of her talent. Blade Runner 2049 w as praised by critics but didn’t quite connect with general audiences , and it became one of the biggest box-office bombs of 2017. Unfortunately, Terminator: Dark Fate didn’t do any better, despite being a highly-anticipated movie.

Terminator: Dark Fate did well with critics but didn’t succeed at the box office , becoming one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time . Despite the failures of her biggest movies to date, Davis was actually one of the best parts of them, but their flaws sadly overshadowed her talent, making her one of the most underrated actors of the last decade.

The Speak No Evil Remake Should Be A Reminder Of How Good Mackenzie Davis Is

Mackenzie davis deserves a chance to truly shine.

Mackenzie Davis hasn’t starred in a movie since Happiest Season in 2020, though she starred in the apocalyptic TV series Station Eleven as Kirsten Raymonde in 2021 and voiced Martha in Love, Death & Robots ’ episode “The Very Pulse of the Machine”. 2024, then, marked Davis’ return to the big scream, first with the black comedy Swimming Home and later with Speak No Evil . The latter is also Davis’ return to horror after The Turning in 2020, but it looks a lot more promising than it.

Davis has already shown her acting range , going from drama in Halt and Catch Fire and Black Mirror to full-on action in Terminator: Dark Fate , and she hasn’t disappointed with her performances (even if the movies did). Speak No Evil can show yet another side of Mackenzie Davis’ acting skills, and the movie has already gathered enough attention for it to remind the audience of her talent.

Speak No Evil (2024)

Speak No Evil is a 2024 horror-thriller film by writer-director James Watkins. A remake of the 2022 movie Speak No Evil follows a family who head to the country for a much-needed vacation - but the situation quickly deteriorates, thrusting them into a horrific nightmare.