Black Christmas (2019)

The 2019 Black Christmas arrives with its thesis stapled to the front door. Sophia Takal's remake moves the slaughter to Hawthorne College, where a sorority house full of young women is stalked by masked pledges acting on behalf of a dead founder's supernatural plumbing. The original 1974 film let its politics simmer under the floorboards. This version drags them into the living room, hands them a microphone, and asks them to sing. The result is a slasher that knows exactly what it is angry about and has no interest in subtlety as a delivery system.

The female ensemble is assembled with evident care, and the casting extends a genuine welcome to faces the subgenre has historically ignored. Aleyse Shannon's Kris and Caleb Eberhardt's Landon occupy real space in the story. Race, however, goes unexamined as a structure. These characters exist inside a narrative that has no language for it. The rape-culture critique, by contrast, is the entire engine. Fraternity ritual, institutional silence, a professor who cannot bring himself to teach women writers, a talent-show number that names the problem out loud while the camera holds. Takal has said she wanted audiences to feel seen. They will. They will also feel spoken to, at length, often.

Where the film lands is somewhere between catharsis and sermon. The final act offers a statue of the patriarchy's founder reduced to rubble, which satisfies in the way a dropped plate satisfies. This is not a subtle movie, and it is not trying to be. The kills are bloodless enough for a thirteen-year-old. The messaging is not. For viewers who want their horror to argue, this one argues loudly and wins on points. For everyone else, the arguing is the whole show.