The sixth Scream takes the killer to New York and gives him a shotgun, and two of its set pieces are the series’ best in years. The talk between them is tired, and the mystery it builds towards is its weakest.
Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega) have left Woodsboro for New York. Tara is at college with the twins Mindy and Chad Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding), Sam is in therapy with Dr Christopher Stone (Henry Czerny), and the internet has decided she was the real killer last time. Then a film studies lecturer is lured into an alley, a mask is left beside her, and the phone rings. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who directed the 2022 film, are back with the same writers, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.
It is the most violent the series has been, and in two long stretches the most frightening since Wes Craven’s original in 1996. It is also the most talkative, and the talk is where it goes wrong. Between the set pieces the film explains itself, explains the series, explains what a franchise is, and then explains its own solution at length. It runs 123 minutes and would be sharper at 100.
Take the two stretches first. Ghostface follows the sisters into a bodega and, for the first time in six films, produces a shotgun. The aisles are a body wide, the shelving gives way, and Brett Jutkiewicz keeps the camera at the sisters’ height so we never see round a corner before they do. Later, on Halloween, the four board a subway carriage full of people in horror costumes, several dressed as the killer, and the lights fail between stations. Jutkiewicz lights it with the carriage’s own strip lights, so the frame goes black every few seconds and comes back with the passengers rearranged, and Jay Prychidny cuts on the flicker rather than against it. Avery Plewes’s costumes do the rest: half the carriage is a suspect. We sat rigid, counting masks along with Tara, and we cannot remember a slasher sequence in years that held its nerve so long without a cheap sting.
This Ghostface is fast, patient and happy to shoot, and Roger L. Jackson’s voice on the line has dropped the playfulness and kept the contempt. Michele Laliberte gives him rooms worth stalking: the sisters’ flat with a window facing another across the alley, which the film puts to use with a ladder; the bodega with its steel shutter; and, for the last act, a derelict cinema fitted out as a shrine to every previous killing. It is the best set in the film. It is also where the film stops being about people and starts being about its own back catalogue.
Barrera has grown into Sam, a woman who knows what her father was and is frightened of what that makes her, and she plays the fear as stillness. Ortega is the livelier presence, and Tara’s wish to be an ordinary student at an ordinary party is the film’s one recognisable human want; the sisters arguing in their kitchen is the best-written scene without a knife in it. Hayden Panettiere returns as Kirby Reed, older, armed and welcome. Dermot Mulroney’s detective, Liana Liberato’s Quinn, Jack Champion’s Ethan and Josh Segarra’s neighbour Danny are placed exactly where suspects are placed, and the film knows we know it. Neve Campbell is not in this one, the first without her, and her absence is felt in every scene that needs an adult.
The trouble is the mouth on it. Mindy’s speech about what a franchise now demands is meant as a joke on the film we are watching, and it lands once. The film then does everything the speech predicted, in order. The mystery, which we will not describe, is set up with so many pointed glances that guessing is no sport, and the reveal arrives as a speech in a room, longer than any the series has managed, with a motive that would not survive a second’s thought. Brian Tyler and Sven Faulconer score all of it with drones and a sting on every door, and after the quiet of the subway it feels like being shouted at. We felt the air go out of the film in that last room, and we sat waiting for it to end.
Craven’s first film had the joke and the knife in the same hand. This one has sharpened the knife and let the joke go blunt. It is better staged than the 2022 film and worse plotted, which for a slasher is roughly a draw. See it for the shop and the train, with company if you can find it, and sit through the speech. It carries an 18 and earns it.
