Scream (2022)

Twenty-five years after the original Woodsboro killings, a new Ghostface stalks a fresh crop of teenagers whose parents survived the first massacre, and the film's chief business is sorting out which of them will live. The young ensemble is noticeably diverse, led by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, with Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown in support. None of them remarks on it. The casting is a matter of arithmetic, not argument, and the movie proceeds as though ethnicity were part of the furniture. That is the quiet kind of representation, present in the faces and absent from the dialogue.

Mindy Meeks-Martin is openly queer and mentions a girlfriend in passing, which the film treats as unremarkable and then sets aside. The women carry the heavy lifting: Sam, Tara, Sidney, and one of the killers, all competent with weapons and grudges. No thesis accompanies them. Sam's visions of her biological father, Billy Loomis, register as trauma and horror staging, not as a study of any mind. There is no climate anxiety here, no sermon about bodies, no reimagining of the historical record. The film has other interests.

Its one sustained stretch of instruction arrives when Mindy halts the party to define the requel, explaining how legacy sequels recycle old characters to legitimize new ones. The speech is genre taxonomy, not moral instruction, though it is unmistakably a character stopping the film to deliver a thesis. The killers' grievance is fandom disappointment, with only the faintest swipe at studios that milk a franchise until the udder squeaks. That swipe is not an economic argument. The film behaves itself. It knows its own history and repeats it with better manners.