Leatherface (2017)

It is the eighth installment in a franchise that has been sawing at the same nerve since 1974, and Leatherface arrives with the modest ambition of explaining how a boy named Jedidiah Sawyer became a man in a mask of human skin. The directors, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, approach the assignment with a certain European grimness. A mental institution. An escape. A diner massacre. A pursuit across Texas scrubland, with Stephen Dorff's deranged Ranger chewing the scenery like a man who has not eaten in days. The machinery is well oiled. The screams are sincere.

What the film does not bring is a cultural program. The cast is white, the setting is rural, and nobody involved seems troubled by that arrangement. A subplot in which young Jedidiah was raised in drag was written and then removed, leaving the franchise's long-standing gender ambiguity unexplored. Lili Taylor's Verna is a matriarch of genuine menace, but the film never interrogates motherhood or patriarchy. She is a woman who encourages her son to kill, and that is the whole of her. The institutionalized are monsters or casualties, their suffering a plot mechanism. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no argument about who deserves what.

The result is a nasty, competent, joyless prequel that treats its own mythology as a puzzle to be solved. It has no message and no cause. It wants to show a young man losing his mind and then bisecting a lawman with a chainsaw, and it does so with professional dispatch. In the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, this film registers as a blank page. That is not a criticism. It is a classification. Some vintages are simply dry.