Terrifier 2 (2022)

Terrifier 2 arrives as the second installment of a franchise built on the modest foundation of a 2016 indie slasher, and it conducts itself with the confidence of a much older institution. Damien Leone wrote, edited, and directed the picture, funding a practical-effects sequence through a crowdfunding campaign that overshot its goal by a wide margin. The result runs well over two hours, a duration the film fills with mutilation, and it does so without a single argument to make about the world outside the frame. There is no thesis here. No social proposition is advanced, tested, or defended. The villain kills because killing is what he does, and the camera lingers because lingering is what the camera does.

Sienna Shaw, the teenage heroine in Valkyrie armor, was conceived as Art's opposite number, a dynamic Leone has compared to the relationship between Batman and the Joker. She is competent, armored, and given genuine interiority, which places her at the upper end of the slasher tradition's final-girl continuum. That tradition is where she stays. Her competence is the genre's ordinary inheritance, not a manifesto, and the film subjects her to the same grinding cruelty it visits on everyone else. A viewer hunting for a political program in her sword will come away empty-handed.

The distinguishing feature of this picture is its hostility to meaning. It is cruel, mean-spirited, and proud of it, and the craft on display (animatronics, prosthetics, a body puppet operated by hands beneath a bed frame) is deployed in service of nothing but discomfort. Critics who found the earlier film thin on narrative got a plot this time, and a villain with a mythology. Nobody got a sermon. In an era of cinema that explains itself constantly, there is something almost restful about a film with no interest in our improvement. It simply wants us to look away, and it keeps score of how many of us do.