| A | Fantastic Fest 2026 |
Marvelous way to start Fantastic Fest! I loved this movie!
Zach Cregger sure knows how to direct a movie. Very stylish, very suspenseful, very in your face at the right times. And the star, Austin Abrams, who was in every scene, did a marvelous job as the (slightly dim) everyman caught in a world going to pieces.
Cregger also knows how to (co-)write a movie. I was wowed by the amount of humor interspersed with the scares and the creepiness. There was enough story to satisfy me, despite being a horror movie. And while it avoided the traps that movies based on video games often succumb to, I could see afterwards how it followed a video game kind of pattern. (Of course, that pattern leads to quality in all forms of fiction: Run into a challenge, defeat that challenge [or not], run into a bigger challenge…)
But the visuals absolutely blew me away. I have never played the game or seen the previous movies so I don’t know how many of these were unique vs. derived from the predecessors (though in the Q&A, Cregger said he was usually striving for new stuff). But man oh man, such creepiness. Stunning.
And I loved the ending! Pitch perfect! Okay, I’ll stop gushing now. Just go see it—it’s already in theaters.
