Creep 2 (2017)

Creep 2 arrives as a found-footage sequel with a modest proposition: a serial killer approaching his fortieth birthday has grown bored of his work, and a video artist named Sara, who builds intimacy with lonely men for an unsuccessful web series, drives to a remote cabin to film him. What follows is a two-hander. Mark Duplass and Desiree Akhavan occupy nearly every frame, and the film has no interest in anything beyond the strange courtship of killer and subject. The casting is diverse and entirely unremarked. Akhavan is Iranian-American, Karan Soni appears in support, and the film treats this as nothing at all, which is either a quiet virtue or simply an absence of ambition. We lean toward the latter, though we note it without complaint.

There is a faint pulse of self-determination in Sara. She pursues her own work, she agrees to the day's terms, and she ends the film by climbing out of a grave and hitting her host in the back of the head with a shovel. This is not an argument. It is a survival. The film never pauses to explain what Sara represents, and Aaron's loneliness and eccentricity are framed as pathology, not as a condition deserving of advocacy. The body here is a site of stabbing and burial, not affirmation.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. No economic critique, no environmental anxiety, no historical revision, no sermon. The film is lean, darkly funny, and committed to the awkward silence instead of the moral. It is the rare horror sequel that asks nothing of its audience except attention. We found this restful.