Scream movie review (2022) | Little White Lies

Scream

12 Jan 2022 / Released: 14 Jan 2022

Hooded figure in dark corridor, wearing Ghostface mask from Scream film franchise.
Hooded figure in dark corridor, wearing Ghostface mask from Scream film franchise.
4

Anticipation.

Love the original Scream, and Olpin and Gillett are directors to watch.

3

Enjoyment.

Well crafted, but really just the same old-same old.

3

In Retrospect.

Sure whodunnit, but also, really now, whocares?

This styl­ish­ly direct­ed requel” trick­i­ly rakes over the grave of the orig­i­nal Scream films, but please, no more!

Not long after Wes Craven went all post­mod­ern on a fran­chise of his own in Wes Cravens New Night­mare, the direc­tor gave a sim­i­lar self-ref­er­en­tial treat­ment to John Carpenter’s Hal­loween and its many 80s imi­ta­tors with Scream. Along the way he used the pow­er of pas­tiche to revive not only the slash­er, but also an entire hor­ror genre grown mori­bund in the ear­ly nineties.

Where Scream looked back to slash­ers past, its sequels increas­ing­ly just looked back to Scream, cir­cling ever inwards to rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing, self-involved returns while prov­ing very reluc­tant to kill their dar­lings. In 2011, 11 years after his tril­o­gy end­ed, Craven returned for a fourth, but despite intro­duc­ing the next gen­er­a­tion, could not quite bring him­self to let his sur­viv­ing com­pa­ny of lega­cy’ char­ac­ters (once them­selves young adults, now just adults) be over­tak­en or out­done by the new blood that this fran­chise very much need­ed. And so it played like a reac­tionary vic­to­ry for the olds in a fran­chise that had once felt so fresh.

Anoth­er 11 years lat­er, and with Craven him­self now dead, the helm has been hand­ed to direc­tors Matt Bet­tinel­li Olpin and Tyler Gillett for this lat­est sequel – enti­tled just Scream with­out the 5, much as the pre­ten­tious’ eighth entry in the Stab fran­chise-with­in-a-fran­chise, loose­ly based on the real’ Woods­boro killings, is just called Stab.

Yet the spir­it of Craven – and Car­pen­ter – still very much haunts this new instal­ment. Is Wes still bug­ging you?” reads a text that Tara Car­pen­ter (Jen­na Orte­ga) receives from her friend Amber (Mikey Madi­son) in the film’s open­ing sequence – and even if the text will turn out to be specif­i­cal­ly ref­er­enc­ing the girls’ school­friend Wes Hicks (Dylan Min­nette), the son of Woodsboro’s deputy-turned-sher­iff Judy Hicks (Mar­ley Shel­ton), his name, and Tara’s sur­name, point to a dif­fer­ent lay­er of legacy.

Tara is attacked by a killer in a Ghost­face mask who is recre­at­ing (and updat­ing) the famous open­ing scene from the first Scream (and the first Stab). Yet Tara’s sur­vival and sub­se­quent hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion will draw her estranged old­er sis­ter Sam (Melis­sa Bar­bara) back to Woods­boro from Modesto, with boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) in tow. As the bod­ies pile up, old Scream sur­vivors Sid­ney (Neve Camp­bell), Gale (Court­ney Cox) and Dewey (David Arquette) will also return once again to this ever cold but ever warm­ing case.

They race to unmask the killer – or killers – among them­selves or Tara’s super-smart friends (Mason Good­ing, Jas­min Savoy Brown, Sonia Ben Ammar, all excel­lent), in a small town where every­one has inher­it­ed an inces­tu­ous con­nec­tion to the orig­i­nal slaughter.

Where Craven seemed increasingly to be phoning it in, this is the most stylishly directed of all the Scream sequels.

Mean­while some­one is self-con­scious­ly try­ing to restage, reboot and renew Woodsboro’s nineties mas­sacre and to return things to ground zero – some­one who respects the franchise’s tra­di­tion of meta-slash­ing antics, and who express­ly cuts short any attempt to intro­duce vogu­ish post-2000s ele­vat­ed’ ele­ments. Which is to say that this lat­est spree is open­ly mod­elled – set-piece by set-piece – on the first Scream, even as it con­stant­ly nego­ti­ates its own del­i­cate sta­tus as a requel’ in a shift­ing hor­ror landscape.

This new Scream toys with our knowl­edge of the old – a knowl­edge that we share with the Stab-savvy char­ac­ters – its very famil­iar­i­ty fuelling nos­tal­gia while let­ting expec­ta­tions yield their own mod­est red her­rings. Like Scream 4, it is inter­est­ed in two very dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions which have both inher­it­ed the trau­mas of the first Scream, even as it skew­ers pre­cise­ly the con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture of fan­dom that demands back­ward-look­ing sequels like this in the first place.

It is as clever-clever as the rest, and where Craven seemed increas­ing­ly – like his masked killers – to be phon­ing it in, this is cer­tain­ly the most styl­ish­ly direct­ed of all the sequels. But still, its iron­ic self-con­scious­ness about how tired its mate­r­i­al has become does not ulti­mate­ly make it any less tired. Scream may stab the orig­i­nal repeat­ed­ly in the back, and may evis­cer­ate its own tropes from the inside out (not for the first, or even fourth, time), but do we real­ly need to keep (re)re-reading these over-spilt entrails?

In the end, every Ghost­face killer is just cir­cling the same old his­to­ries and hunt­ing grounds, with lit­tle new to show for the effort, except maybe the promise of yet more movie cash-ins.

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