My Corner

Zach Cregger’s sophomore nightmare works like a pressure cooker, slow to hiss, then impossible to silence. The premise sounds simple, yet the execution breeds a kind of grief that yanks breath from a room. A premium IMAX crowd began politely hushed, then cracked into gasps, shouts, and a single mid-reel ovation. Few recent studio horrors have engineered such communal volatility, which alone earns respect.

Structure arrives in interlocking chapters, each lensing a different soul pulled into the vortex. Julia Garner’s Justine Gandy staggers through morning light and accusatory stares, a teacher condemned before any truth emerges. Josh Brolin’s Archer carries a father’s dull ache that mutates into moral whiplash. Alden Ehrenreich’s cop Paul and Austin Abrams’s drifter James bring ragged humor and frayed nerves, while Benedict Wong’s principal Marcus anchors civic decency until civic decency collapses.

Cinematographer Larkin Seiple and editor Joe Murphy supply nervous momentum without empty flash. Camera placement hugs doors, shoulders, and pavement, forcing proximity to fear while preserving clarity. A single recurring tableau, children sprinting through darkness with arms spread like airplanes, sears itself into memory. Suburbia turns cavernous, every cul-de-sac a stage for whispered doom.

Sound carries equal weight. The Holladay brothers’ score, with input from Cregger, pumps lifeblood through languid passages, then snaps pulses into sprinting rhythm. Melodic lines never congratulate themselves; propulsion serves dread, not prestige sheen. A theater’s subwoofers become accomplices.

Performance textures invite argument rather than applause alone. Garner leans into awkward sincerity, thick glasses and all, rejecting glam polish for human fragility. Brolin offers a late-career study in clenched compassion, one rueful laugh landing like a relief valve for an entire auditorium. Ehrenreich spikes guilt with jittery charisma, while Abrams steals pockets and scenes, hungry for cash and a way out. Wong radiates patient authority, a lighthouse before the fog swallows the shoreline.

Conversation around theme will rage. A chorus of missing students evokes American nightmares around schools, yet Cregger refuses neon signposting. Multiple readings rise and clash, from suburban rot to institutional paralysis to rage curdling into superstition. Ambiguity functions as both virtue and irritant, depending on a viewer’s appetite for answers.

Mechanics do not always click. Early stretches flirt with a stall, and clue-dropping sometimes withholds information in ways that feel less cunning than contrived. Mystery resolution satisfies more in sensation than in logic, trading airtight deduction for operatic catharsis. The film chooses scars over Sudoku.

Then comes Amy Madigan, delivering a late-arriving presence that freezes blood. Menace feels inexorable, almost elemental, which fuels audience fury and sorrow in equal measure. Few villains in recent mainstream horror radiate such control over a frame, and few exits feel so deserved while still deepening tragedy.

Cregger’s calling card remains tonal elasticity. Grotesquerie rubs shoulders with gallows comedy, set-pieces flirt with iconography, and character work resists cheap absolution. Craft choices never chase cool for its own sake; momentum stays tethered to bruised people making terrible choices for understandable reasons.