Thanksgiving (2023)

Eli Roth has finally expanded his fictitious Grindhouse trailer into a feature, and the result is a slasher that knows precisely what it is. A Black Friday stampede at a Plymouth, Massachusetts superstore leaves three dead, and a year later a killer in a John Carver mask begins working through everyone he holds responsible. The geography is correct, the pilgrim hat is correct, and the film has no ambitions beyond the reliable mechanics of the genre. Roth stages the carnage with the enthusiasm of a man who has waited fifteen years for this.

Weekend shoppers trampling one another for a discounted television is the film's one sustained piece of social observation, and it lands because the horror is baked into the spectacle. The store is a temple of consumption, the mob is the congregation, and nobody in the frame learns a lesson. That is the extent of the film's cultural commentary. A reasonably mixed cast moves through the story without the screenplay ever noticing their backgrounds, and Jessica, the capable young woman who survives by outwitting the sheriff, follows a template that has been standard since the late seventies. There is no sermon here. The film has no interest in instructing anyone.

What remains is craft. The kills are inventive, the whodunit is serviceable, and the whole thing is content to be a seasonal curio, trotted out each November like a decorative gourd. It does not lecture, it does not moralize, and it does not pretend to be about anything larger than a man in a mask with a bone to pick. For a genre exercise, that restraint is its own quiet virtue.