The Curse of Bridge Hollow (2022)

The Curse of Bridge Hollow arrives as the sort of seasonal product that Netflix manufactures the way a commercial bakery manufactures fruitcakes: reliably, without visible enthusiasm, and in quantities the market did not request. Jeff Wadlow directs this tale of the Gordon family, newly relocated from Brooklyn to a small town whose devotion to Halloween appalls the scientist father, Howard, played by Marlon Wayans with the weary competence of a man who has done this before. His teenage daughter Syd, played by Priah Ferguson, lights the cursed lantern and unleashes Stingy Jack upon the town's decorations. The film is competent, cheap-looking in the manner of all streaming holiday filler, and entirely content to be forgotten by November.

A Black family anchors the production, and a reasonably varied supporting cast fills out the town, though the film never once gestures at what any of this might mean. Race is present as casting and absent as subject. The daughter drives the plot, outthinking her disbelieving father at every turn, but the screenplay treats this as the standard architecture of a family comedy about a stubborn dad, not as any kind of statement. There is no romance to interrogate, no institution to indict, no identity to examine. The town's festival is quaint, its mayor is harmless, and the snacks are gluten-free purely so the movie can make a face about it.

What lessons does it impart. Believe in things. Embrace your family's quirks. Eat a cookie once in a while, because you only live once. This is the entire moral architecture, delivered through the father's late-act conversion and a closing joke about sugar. Nobody is lectured about the climate, the economy, or the correct way to speak. The film has no ambition beyond filling ninety minutes of an October evening. We classify it accordingly: a harmless confection, culturally weightless, and mercifully brief.