Splinter (2008)

Toby Wilkins made a siege picture in 2008 and had the good sense not to dress it up as anything else. A young couple, a pair of low-rent criminals, a shuttered gas station, and a fungus that turns corpses into jerky, hostile puppets. The creature hunts by body temperature. That is the entire intellectual architecture of the film, and it holds under pressure. There is no subtext to excavate here because the filmmakers never buried any. What they buried was a pump attendant, and he comes back angry.

The cast is uniformly white, which is simply what the production had on hand near Oklahoma City, not a statement about anything. No character announces a sexuality, interrogates a power structure, or pauses mid-crisis to explain an ecological principle. Dennis, the escaped convict, offers a dying confession about a bank account and a man he shot, and it registers as a flicker of conscience, not a thesis on the carceral state. The parasites are parasites. Nobody proposes that they stand in for extraction, empire, or the housing market. The film is interested in blood temperature and severed limbs, and it pursues those interests with discipline.

Polly Watt comes closest to a progressive figure, and she earns the designation by being competent. She handles fireworks, keeps her head, and assists in an amputation without ceremony. This is the ordinary resourcefulness of a horror survivor, not an argument about gender. The whole affair runs eighty-two minutes and spends every one of them on tension, gore, and the logistics of escape. It never lectures. For viewers who grade a movie by its moral instruction, this will be a barren stretch of land. For everyone else, it is a tight, mean little machine that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize.