Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

The 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre arrives as the ninth entry, a Netflix property where Leatherface is less a bogeyman than a legacy asset. The premise sends idealistic influencers and entrepreneurs to Harlow, Texas, to auction off properties and accelerate gentrification. That is the film's lone brush with social consciousness. It gestures at displacement and influencer culture, then revs the chainsaw. The elderly homeowner dies of a heart attack before the moral accounting can begin. This is not a critique of capital so much as a backdrop for dismemberment.

The cast includes women in leading roles, Black supporting characters, and a nonbinary performer, but the screenplay treats this as ordinary hiring rather than a thesis. No LGBTQ themes surface. No racial consciousness develops. The two sisters at the center follow slasher final-girl choreography, and Sally Hardesty returns as a battle-hardened avenger. Her presence nods to feminist endurance without arguing a feminist case. Lila's history as a school-shooting survivor gives her a fear of guns. The film does not frame that trauma as neurodivergence, nor does it build a sermon around it. The result is representation without argument, which is its own kind of honesty.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. Climate anxiety does not appear. Body positivity does not appear. Historical revisionism does not appear, unless we count the retconning of sequels, which is franchise bookkeeping. The anti-capitalist strain is real enough to notice and too thin to matter. A bus of buyers is slaughtered, and the film seems less interested in their greed than in the volume of blood. Lecture energy stays low, limited to a few lines about gentrification and trauma before the violence resumes. As a cultural document, it is a mildly aware slasher. As a sommelier might say of a wine that tastes of nothing but oak and alcohol, it is drinkable, forgettable, and best not contemplated further.