Scream VI (2023)

In its sixth outing, the franchise relocates its survivors to New York City, where the buildings are taller and the knives are the same. The filmmakers have assembled a cast that reflects the demographics of a modern university without ever pausing to announce the fact. Latina sisters anchor the story. Black twins bicker and theorize. A young woman is openly gay and has a girlfriend who is killed in due course, as girlfriends in slasher films tend to be. The film treats all of this as ordinary, which is its own quiet achievement and also the reason it registers so faintly as a statement of any kind.

There is a feminine spine here, of a sort. The Carpenter sisters spend the runtime being stalked, stabbed, and underestimated, and they dispatch the men who did it with a knife and a bullet and a television set. Gale Weathers returns to be tormented about a dead boyfriend. Kirby Reed arrives with a badge and a grudge. The film enjoys its women enormously. It does not organize them into an argument.

Elsewhere the cupboards are bare. Race is never examined, only cast. The climate does not intrude. Nobody eats the rich; the killers want revenge for a brother, which is the oldest motive in the genre and the least ideological. Bodies are bodies, mostly for stabbing. Sam's hallucinations are trauma, not diagnosis. The film's commentary is aimed squarely at other horror movies, which it discusses with the enthusiasm of a fan rather than the sternness of a lecturer. A competent, bloody, self-aware exercise. The needle does not move much, and it was never trying to.