Halloween Ends (2022)

Halloween Ends arrives with the weight of a trilogy on its shoulders and the stated ambition of being, of all things, a love story. The film delivers, instead, a study of a small Illinois town that has decided to eat its young, or at least its babysitters. Corey Cunningham, cleared by a judge but convicted by his neighbors, becomes the vessel for the community's need to blame something. The film is interested in scapegoats, in trauma passed down like a family heirloom, and in the way a mob manufactures the monster it fears. These are old themes, handled with a straight face and a body count.

Laurie Strode's arc carries a faint glow of self-liberation. She writes a memoir, she reopens herself to romance, she tells the masked figure that he is merely a man. The final girl has been doing this work since 1978, and the granddaughter who stands beside her in the final act is a familiar arrangement. There is a grandmother-granddaughter survivor dynamic here, and it registers as empowerment in the loosest sense. It is not a thesis. It is inheritance.

Elsewhere the film is barren ground for contemporary cultural markers. Race never enters the frame as a subject, and the cast leans overwhelmingly white, with a few minority performers scattered into minor or antagonistic parts and no effort to sell diversity as a feature. There is no queer content, no climate anxiety, no economic critique, no body-positive gesture. Corey's descent is framed as supernatural infection, a contagion passed from one killer to another, which leaves no room for mental-health advocacy. The film gestures at mob violence and communal guilt, and it does so through stabbing rather than sermon. A modest specimen. The mask is kept, the shredder runs, and the credits roll on a franchise that has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.