Thoughts on Obsession

   At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Obsession, a 2025 supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Curry Barker. The film stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a young man in his early twenties who works at a music store with his friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Sarah (Megan Lawless), and Nikki (Inde Navarette). Bear has a crush on Nikki, but is too nervous to confess his feelings to her, and Ian wants him to just get it over with and ask her, but not during their weekly bar trivia night, as to not spoil the fun. Bear comes home to find that his cat Sandy has died after accidentally consuming Bear's oxycodone pills. The next day, he shops for a gift for Nikki because she lost her crystal necklace, and he goes to a crystal shop, but instead of getting a crystal, he finds a novelty toy called "One Wish Willow," where the user can make one wish and break a plastic log in half. 

    Later that night, after bar trivia, Bear drives Nikki home, who is asking him if he likes Sarah, hinting that Sarah likes him. Bear completely whiffs the chance to confess his feelings, denying it when Nikki directly asks if he likes her, and as she is at the front door of his house, Bear in his car goes, "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the world," and snaps the willow log. Suddenly, Nikki stops before going into the house, then runs back to Bear in his car, and her behavior is erratic, switching between wanting him to come inside and then screaming, and then brushing off her own behavior as "weird." Bear is confused by Nikki's behavior, but comes in, and she keeps switching between trying to seduce him and having screaming fits. Bear doesn't understand any of this, and despite his own hesitations, he is flattered when Nikki is attracted to him, and against his better judgment, takes advantage of the situation, and they become a couple, with Nikki being overly possessive and jealous, manipulating him with her mood swings.

    This movie could be taken in different ways, how it is about an unhealthy, codependent relationship, where the monster that has taken over Nikki (it is implied that the real Nikki's consciousness is trapped in some kind of hell while the "loving girlfriend" persona takes over, with large, forced smiles that she holds for an uncomfortable amount of time) is the abuser, taking advantage of Bear's attraction to her by keeping him close to her and acting out in random violence of hurting herself or others. But that it can be seen as Bear having unwittingly taken away Nikki's free will, and rather than finding a way earlier to undo the spell or fix things, he lets it go on because he is happy that his crush is so into him and his fantasy has become a reality. Nikki may be the violent one causing mayhem, but Bear is the one who started this by being unable to face rejection or get out of his arrested development of acting like a teenager when he is past 21 years old.

    The movie is very effective with silhouettes and shadows, often hiding Nikki's face, or the brief times when the real Nikki will get control of her body to speak her own words or ask for help before the monster shuts her down again. 

    The two leads are fantastic in the film. Michael Johnston takes a character that can be sympathetic at first as a lovelorn loser who is pining after his crush, unaware that his other female friend is into him, and seems emotionally stunted and needs to grow up more. But then he becomes more selfish in taking advantage of the situation, and though his idle wish doesn't deserve such punishment, when the real Nikki reaches out to him for help, he still can only think of his own desires and not her feelings.

    Inde Navarette is in a star-making turn with this performance. Director Curry Barker had her study performances from Betty Gabriel in Get Out, Toni Collette in Hereditary, and Mia Goth in Pearl to develop the character of Nikki, and there are elements from those roles, like Betty Gabriel's performance as a woman whose body is possessed and whose soul is in the Sunken Place, only able to briefly reach out with her real life briefly, and Mia Goth's performance as a manic woman who tries to act "normal" but, in the finale, greets her horrified husband with an unsettling wide smile throughout the ending credits. Navarette switches between voices and personas quickly; saying "no" several times in one scene with different rising intonations; and her physical performance is raw and emotionally taxing. The film helps with showing Nikki before the transformation, as a regular person, making it more tragic when her body and mind is stolen by this demon because of Bear's unrequited crush.

    The movie is also darkly funny. It's meant to be grim, but there are several moments that are funny, like Nikki's intense frowny face; the reaction from a crystal shop employee saying that people come back to complain about the wishes they got and Bear not understanding the risk he's taking; the response from the One Wish Willow customer service representative that Bear calls to try to cancel the wish; and another attempt to fix the wish that goes horribly wrong. 

    I really liked this movie. I kept forgetting the characters were young adults because they acted like teenagers, and it did speak a lot to their own immaturity and limited life experiences when trying to handle adult situations. I'm glad this movie ended up becoming a sleeper hit, it's well-deserved.

Thoughts on Modern Girls

     On Tubi, I watched Modern Girls, a 1986 comedy film directed by Jerry Kramer, and co-written by Laurie Craig and Anita Rosenberg. The film stars Daphne Zuniga, Cynthia Gibb, and Virginia Madsen as three young women in their early twenties, living together as roommates in L.A. and working menial jobs. Margo (Zuniga) works in telemarketing, a boring job where the manager repeats "keep dialing"; Cece (Gibb) gets fired from her makeup job in a department store, and Kelly (Madsen) does very well working in a pet store and selling pets and pet supplies, mainly due to her looks. 

    They all work crappy jobs, but the highlight of their life is going out to clubs at night, where, due to their "pretty privilege," they can work connections to skip lines and get into clubs for free, and never have to pay for their own drinks, always flirting with guys to get drinks out of them.

    When Kelly takes Margo's car to see a DJ ex she's re-connected with, Margo and Cece are left stuck at home, until Kelly's blind date Clifford (Clayton Rohner) shows up. The girls are hesitant to tell him that Kelly went out with another guy, but take advantage of him to get him to drive them out to the club to "find Kelly," seeing him more as a dork and not their usual type. 

    At the club, Clifford quickly finds out that Kelly ditched him for the DJ, and only sticks around in the club because he's the other girls' ride home. Margo and Cece do their act to get free drinks, and dance around, while feeling bad about how they treated Clifford and including him more as part of their group, getting him a free drink too.

    The story goes into a "one crazy night" plot, as the girls and Clifford chase Kelly around various clubs/bars in L.A. as she deals with rejection by the DJ by getting intoxicated, taking drugs, rolling around on a billiard table (in a fun display of physical comedic acting by Madsen), and twice having to be rescued from near-rape by her friends due to her carelessness and using her looks to charm random men.

    Cece is enamored with a rock star, Bruno X (also played by Rohner), who she meets in a club and instantly falls for her, but says he's leaving for Rio in the morning, then they get separated and Cece is searching for him all over. In one scene that makes sense with the same actor in both roles, the group show up at an outdoor video shoot to look for Bruno, only for the director to see that Clifford resembles him and uses him as a body double in a scene with four women dressed in black leather dancing around him, and Clifford has to improvise and just go with it.

    I really enjoyed this movie. It's very much set in a 1980s club culture with outlandish outfits, a killer pop/dance soundtrack, very bright with neon colors in nighttime scenes, and an apartment with a fantastic pop art look (including the movie poster with a comic, Roy Lichtenstein look to it).

    I really liked how this film largely centered around the women, and even if they start out taking advantage of men to get free things and coast on their looks, they're not dumb bimbo stereotypes. They all work crappy day jobs, and this is their release to party at night and have fun. And even if they are chasing men through various clubs, they still value their friendships above any dates or boyfriends, and are always looking out for each other. 

    I liked that Clifford starts out being rightfully annoyed at being taken advantage of, but he's not a jerk. He never leaves the women to be stranded anywhere, he helps rescue Kelly from sexual assault, and he has fun being mistaken for Bruno X and being in the video for a second, switching from his more conservative appearance to having his hair mussed up and wearing a long black duster coat that looks great on him.

    Virginia Madsen had this Marilyn Monroe-like pink dress on with a silk scarf around her neck that looked really pretty, and did make her stand out as the most "classically" pretty of the women, though Cynthia Gibb was really cute and Daphne Zuniga had a rugged sexiness to her. They're all a lot of fun to watch in this movie, especially early on in their careers.

Thoughts on The Final Girls

    On Tubi, I watched The Final Girls, a 2015 horror comedy directed by Thomas Strauss-Schulson and co-written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. The movie stars Taissa Farmiga as Max, a teen girl whose mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) is an actress that is best known for her "scream queen" role in a 1986 slasher film called Camp Bloodbath. In the present day of the 2010s, she only has a handful of screen credits, is broke, and is still typecast from her horror role and unable to be cast in other projects. On the way home from a film audition, the two get into a car accident and Amanda is killed.

    Three years later, Max, an orphan living with her aunt, is hanging out with her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat) and Chris (Alexander Ludwig), when Gertie's stepbrother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), a horror film nerd, shows up and tells them that Camp Bloodbath 1 and 2 are showing at the local theater, and wants Max to make an appearance there to talk about her mother at a Q&A afterwards. Max is hesitant, not wanting to watch her mother die on screen or talk about a movie that her mother was sick of being associated with. But they go to the theater, where Chris' ex-girlfriend and Max' former best friend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) shows up, trying to woo Chris back. During the movie, the theater is accidentally set ablaze by a stray cigarette and a rolling bottle of liquor on the floor, and the group of friends can only escape through cutting a hole in the movie screen, trying to find an exit, but end up in the movie itself.

    The group are in the woods, and a van comes by with two of the Camp Bloodbath characters, Tina (Angela Timbur), a ditzy "slut" archetype, and Kurt (Adam Devine), a jockbro stereotype frequently making sexual comments about women. The group initially turn down the ride to the summer camp, but a title card reads "92 minutes later" (the runtime of both the fictional movie and this real movie), the van comes back again with Tina and Kurt, saying their same lines, NPC-style, and again 92 minutes later. The group realizes they will be in a time loop if they don't get in the van and continue the plot, so they pretend to be new camp counselors and go to the camp, where Max meets Nancy (Akerman), and while she knows it's not really her mother, she wants to save Nancy from dying in the movie, transferring her feelings about wanting to save her real mother from death. 

    The group initially lets two murders happen without interference, but when their interference causes characters to die out of order, or realizing that not being movie characters doesn't make them immune, more calamity happens, as the group realizes they are not going to survive just following the original movie's plot, and have to be more creative, as well as interacting with the movie characters who don't know that they aren't real people.

    I really enjoyed this movie a lot. I liked the gags like when Nancy is telling the origin story of the slasher killer, and gray matter starts dripping from the roof and wraps up the group and transports them to the black-and-white 1950s flashback of the killer's story as Nancy is narrating, having to step over large subtitles reading "Summer 1957" in block letters. Or when Kurt gets called out by Chris for his homophobia, hearing Chris has two gay dads, and mockingly goes, "Oh, do they go to discos and have sex with each other?" before dropping the derisive tone and adding, "Actually, that does sound kind of cool." Devine is really good in this movie, in playing the 80s horny guy stereotype who constantly objectifies women with crass language and obviously mocking him.

    The heart of the film is with Max and Nancy/Amanda, and Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman are excellent in this film. Max is still just a kid, and even if Farmiga was about 20 when she was in the film, she brings a lot of young vulnerability to this role, as a girl who lost her mother too soon, and is trying to save a version of her to bring her back. And Akerman is so warm and kind as Nancy, who initially starts in the fictional film as "I'm just a shy girl who's a virgin and wants to have sex with this cool guy" before getting killed, and as Nancy is further developed as a person, she talks about wanting to go to college and do more with her life and not be so shy. Even if Max can't let on to Nancy that she sees her as her mother, Nancy does take more of a big sister/mothering role to Max, caring about her, and the finale with them and the use of "Bette Davis Eyes," the song playing in the car before the accident, is incredibly moving and stunning, with a synth score and gorgeous colors.

    The film was co-written by Joshua John Miller, a former child actor who was in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Near Dark, River's Edge, and Teen Witch. His father, Jason Miller, played the priest in The Exorcist, and Miller said the film was partially inspired by that experience, saying ""I grew up watching my dad in The Exorcist, and there's something haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film. But it's something that also becomes iconic, and we tried to deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance, but your second chance was inside of a movie?" It works really well in the film, as Max is struggling with her grief and seeing a version of her mother and wanting to save her, even when knowing that Nancy isn't real.

    I had heard that this film was really good, and I'm glad I caught it on Tubi, I found it much more moving, as well as funnier, than I expected.

Thoughts on Backrooms

    At the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan, I went with a friend to see Backrooms, a 2026 sci-fi psychological horror film directed by Kane Parsons, based on his webseries and inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta, and written by Will Soodik. 

    The Backrooms creepypasta has a lot of Internet lore to it, but started with an anonymous photo taken in 2002 posted on 4chan in 2019 of a large, empty room with an unsettling yellow appearance, taken at an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. The photo led to people expanding on the concept of liminal spaces, with interconnected Backrooms and dangerous creatures that roam the spaces. The Backrooms has inspired indie video games and short films, as well as the "innies" world of Severance and in American Horror Stories. 

    Kane Parsons, then 16, uploaded a short horror film in 2022 titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) under the name Kane Pixels, presented as a VHS tape by a filmmaker in 1990 who goes through the Backrooms and is pursued by a monster. The short film was a great success, leading to a series of short films with more backstories added to it, and Parsons got a deal with A24 to develop a mainstream feature length film of it.

    The film takes place in 1990, and starts with a VHS tape shot by researcher Naren Wayne (Avan Jogia) going through the Backrooms, where he gets separated from his group and is chased and attacked by an unknown monster. The story continues with two main characters: furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is struggling with alcoholism and going through a divorce, and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who promotes her self-help audio tapes in local commercials (as does in Clark promoting his furniture store) and who is working through her own trauma from having grown up with a mentally ill, agoraphobic mother. She has him do a role-play exercise with her playing his wife, which leads to him blowing up at her in abusive rants about paying for everything and supporting her while she's a law student, revealing a lot of pent-up anger and nastiness in Clark.

    Clark, having been kicked out of his house by his wife, has taken up residence in the store, and through electrical outages and flickering lights, discovers an invisible portal through the wall of the store's basement and walks through the wall into the Backrooms, a labyrinthine expanse of dull yellow rooms, with narrow pathways leading to small doors or windows, with piled-up furniture, mysterious voices heard from recordings, and the growling sounds of a creature in the distance. Clark escapes the creature and returns back to the store, but when he tells Mary about it, she thinks he is having delusions from alcohol withdrawal and is skeptical and patronizing towards him. 

    Clark brings along two young people, the assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him film the Backrooms as proof of his claims, where the VHS video is more like Kane Parsons' original web series. When calamity happens and Clark isn't returning for more therapy appointments, Mary goes to the furniture store and discovers the Backrooms for herself.

    I found this movie really interesting. I didn't know anything about the Backrooms, so a lot of the lore I had to catch up on before seeing the movie, and I liked the set design of the maze of rooms, as well as the sound design, especially when the monster is eventually revealed, with fantastic practical effects that were portrayed by a real person (actor and former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi), but with an uncomfortable puppetry movement. I liked how weird and unsettling it felt, and I liked the found footage style of the VHS camcorder videos, even if it followed found footage cliches of cutting off just before the big bad is seen.

    I did like how the Backrooms changed based on a person's memories and traumas, and being a misremembered copy of reality. A line that is repeated a couple of times is when Clark says, then later Mary, that to describe the Backrooms to someone is like trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen one before, and getting some details right, but still making it sound confusing.

    Chiwetel Ejiofor is fantastic in this film, playing a guy with just barely constrained rage bubbling under him, and he did some great forehead acting in one scene, seeing his forehead scrunch up as he emoted. Renate Reinsve was really good in playing someone trying to play the role of the understanding, calm therapist while wrestling with her own childhood trauma and repressed issues.

    I especially liked the in-movie commercials where Clark is dressed up as the pirate mascot of his store, with a peg leg strapped to his leg while trying to hobble on it, and a fake parrot on his shoulder, and promoting the furniture store; and Mary in her commercials for her New Age-like therapy audio tapes promising to "open the windows" to further enlightenment and understanding.

    It was good going into this movie cold, as there were some reveals that were in the web series with the backstory of the Backrooms but that I didn't know, and Mark Duplass in a bureaucratic role that feels akin to Paul Reiser's role in Aliens made me hate him a lot, and he's a director/actor who seems like a nice guy, but who I've never liked as an actor, so it was a funny moment of feeling vindicated in not liking him when he popped up.

    I'm happy that my friend and I saw this together, and that I could catch up to the Internet lore to these liminal spaces.

Thoughts on I Love Boosters

    Last week at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw I Love Boosters, a 2026 absurdist crime comedy written and directed by Boots Riley. The film centers on Corvette (Keke Palmer), the ringleader of a group of "boosters," shoplifters who resell high-end designer clothes at a discount to survive. She and her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) create elaborate distractions to pull off their heists, like having a white woman accomplice distract the salespeople, or having one person fake an injury while another steals. Despite all of this, the trio are still broke, and Corvette lives in an abandoned fast-food chicken restaurant, and is haunted by the vision of a giant ball of past-due bills rolling towards her.

    The "Velvet Gang" target the Metro Designers chain, run by designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a billionaire who Corvette both despises for her capitalism and loves for her fashion design, being an aspiring fashion designer herself. Christie regularly appears in the media to claim that her designs are her vision of transformative art, of seeing her customers as wanting to be elevated like her, and she condemns the Velvet Gang as "low-class, urban bitches," to which one of the members, when seeing Christie say it on TV, remarks that "urban bitches" sounds very early 2000s and dated.

    At one of the Metro Designers stores, one of the salespeople, Violeta (Eiza González) and her co-worker confront their boss Grayson (Will Poulter) about why their paychecks are so low, only earning $40 in a week after taxes. He is dismissive to them, keeps blasting loud club music to drown them out, and in between playing music says that the cost of the expensive Metro Designers outfits that they have to wear for work (and have to wear new ones for each season, as well as keeping with monthly monochromatic themes of the store, a la Emerald City in The Wiz) got taken out of their paychecks. Their lunch breaks are only 30 seconds, there is a high turnover rate of employees, and when the Velvet Gang get jobs at that store to steal inventory, Corvette realizes that Christie stole one of her fashion designs off her social media to pass off as her own. But before the Velvet Gang can pull off another heist, all the clothes get stolen in seconds while they are in a meeting with Grayson, and upon security camera footage, they see a young woman named Jianhu (Poppy Liu) sucking all the clothes into her bag, and they go, "She's got a magic bag!"

    The movie is delightfully weird and absurd, where the characters live in a strange world that is heightened reality. Christie Smith lives in a high-rise building that is tilted at a 30 degree angle, where the floor is so tilted that people can barely walk or balance on it, and in a scene when Corvette hides in a coffee cart to spy on Christie, she tries to sneak out and can barely scale the floor to the door before sliding back down.

    The film uses a lot of creative practical effects, like model cars for a car chase, stop-motion animation characters, and zooming back with Keke Palmer on a dolly track for big reactions.

    The film has a lot packed into it, and it feels like it's trying to be about different things: capitalism; labor strikes; artists' designs getting stolen by corporations; poor people being exploited; women of color being marginalized by rich white people; a science fiction teleportation and deconstruction device; unsafe factory conditions, etc. It can get overwhelming and not feel as tightly compact as Riley's previous film Sorry to Bother You, but it is a lot of fun to watch, and I liked how bold and colorful the film was combined with the practical effects. 

    Naomi Ackie was a delight to watch, who I've enjoyed in movies like Mickey 17 and Sorry, Baby, and I thought Eiza González was a scene-stealer and got a more interesting role than just being cast to be "sexy." And I like that after The Substance, Demi Moore is getting more into offbeat, weird films, and throws herself into this role as an awful person who has deluded herself into thinking she's uplifting people with her fashion.

    I really enjoyed this movie a lot, it's one of the standout movies of the year so far.

Thoughts on River

    On Tubi, I watched River, a 2023 Japanese sci-fi comedy directed by Junta Yamaguchi and written by Makoto Ueda. The film takes place in a old winter ryokan, or Japanese inn, in Kibune, outside of Kyoto. The lead character, the waitress Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), is standing by the Kibune river behind the ryokan, then goes back to work, cleaning up a table with the head waiter, but then finds herself back when she started at the river two minutes ago. She feels like this is deja vu, but when this happens for a third time, she and the waiter get confused, both experiencing the same feelings, and then the staff and guests, also being perplexed, realize that they are all stuck in a time loop that keeps repeating itself every two minutes. Their area is the only one affected, and as they are able to retain their memories and not have their mind reset every two minutes, they try to work together to solve the problem. 

    But as the resets keep happening, people start panicking, like two businessmen who are seated eating rice and getting sick of the rice and worrying they will eat it forever; a guest who was in the baths who keeps running out in just a towel with shampoo in his hair; and a novelist who is struggling with finishing his draft, at first welcoming the break but then becoming hysterical. 

    Each reset is filmed as one long take for two minutes, and the staff are frequently running up stairs and through corridors, or going to a separate inn building across the road, and given that they have such a short time before resetting, it's more stressful whenever someone figures out new information but wants everyone to meet in a particular place, where they may not have time to get there to hear everything before the loop happens again.

    I liked how this differed from other time loop films because it had more people stuck in the loop, as opposed to movies that usually have one or two people stuck in it and trying to figure things out and trying to act normal to others unaware of the loop. With everyone in the same predicament, and being able to remember things, it helps keep the story fresh by not repeating the same scene over and over again, with each scene being different based on the latest information they learned. The staff also still have to do their jobs and think of their guests, whether it's bringing in lukewarm sake to the businessmen because there wasn't enough time to make hot sake, or having the man in the baths coming out in a robe in the later scenes so he isn't half-naked in a towel around everyone.

    There is a romantic subplot between Mikoto and a young chef who are dating, and their story plays into Mikoto worrying that by her wishing by the river that it would stop flowing, like a way of stopping time, that she is responsible for the time loop, and she is trying to figure out a conflict with her boyfriend while also trying to end the loop. 

    It works well when everyone learns to be cooperative with each other and stops panicking, and the cause of the time loop circles back to a minor reference early on in the movie that pays off later in an interesting way. I heard of this movie from the Critically Acclaimed podcast, hosted by two film critics, William Bibbiani and Witney Siebold, and they did an episode in 2025 ranking the coziest movies ever made, and I thought this movie sounded really good, and luckily it was streaming on Tubi to watch. So I'm glad for their recommendation, this was a really interesting movie to watch.

Thoughts on Is God Is

     At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Is God Is, a 2026 Southern Gothic revenge film written and directed by Aleshea Harris, adapted from her 2018 play of the same name. The film was co-produced by Tessa Thompson and Janizca Bravo, and stars Kara Young and Mallori Johnson as Racine and Anaia, twin sisters in their twenties who are covered in burn scars, Racine's scars along her left arm and Anaia's scars on her face and upper chest. They survived a domestic violence act as children when their abusive father (Sterling K. Brown) had broken his restraining order and came to their home, choking their mother (Vivica A. Fox) unconscious and setting her on fire in front of the girls, leaving the girls to be burnt in the attempt to save their mother. 

    The girls grew up believing their mother had died, and since their father had abandoned them, they were raised in a series of foster homes, ostracized and called ugly by everyone, especially Anaia because of her facial scars, and work as janitors in an office, applying ointment to each other as a daily ritual at home. Racine is the more outspoken, adventurous one, always defending her sister, while Anaia is more reserved and has a casual relationship with a boyfriend who doesn't want to look at her during sex. Racine often teases Anaia, calling her a "little bitch" in a way to mean she's a coward. The sisters are so close and intuitive with each other that they often exchange silent conversations with knowing looks, with the dialogue of their conversation appearing on the screen.

    Racine receives a letter from their mother, thought to be dead, and the twins travel to her home, where she is bed-ridden and taken care of by a team of healthcare aides, who braid her hair as she explains to them what happened. She tells them that she is dying, and that her deathbed wish is for the twins to avenge her by killing their father, for all the pain and suffering he has left behind, knowing he moved on with another woman and had more children. Their mother, who Racine calls "God" because she created them, convinces them out of their hesitancy by showing her legs to them, not visible to the audience but most likely burned beyond recognition. The sisters agree to their mother's wish, and set off to find their father to enact justice.

    The film is a road trip story, where the sisters encounter various characters who had been left hurt in their father's wake: an evangelical preacher named Divine (Erika Alexander) who is still devoted to their father even though he abandoned her while she was pregnant and her son, their half-brother, is now an adult; the lawyer Chuck Hall (Mykelti Williamson), a man who cannot speak anymore due to their father's violence, communicating by whiteboard, and pays a dominatrix to beat him to train him to be able to fight their father; and eventually their father's third family in the finale.

    I liked how this film was bright and loud and funny, while still being serious about all the abuse and pain and trauma that this one man caused to several Black women throughout his life, and how they felt denied in their revenge and anger, and wanting to see him suffer.

    Kara Young and Mallori Johnson are both excellent in the leads, with Young just popping off the screen as a charismatic star, and Johnson having a more reserved sensitivity to her performance. I liked seeing the supporting cast of well-known names (including Janelle Monae as their father's abused wife in a gilded cage), but Sterling K. Brown as their father was chilling, in playing the father with a soft voice but a psychopathic violence, excusing his past actions as "I was young and didn't know better," despite being an adult then and continuing to harm people on a path of destruction.

    I heard of this movie from a Bluesky tweet from the YouTuber Princess Weekes, who loved the film, and I'm glad I took her recommendation, this was a little gem of a movie.