The Stepfather (2009)

The 2009 reworking of The Stepfather arrives with the confidence of a studio fulfilling a spreadsheet obligation. Nelson McCormick directs Dylan Walsh as a serial familicide who shaves, dyes, and renames himself between murders, a premise the 1987 original exploited for genuine suburban satire. The remake strips that satirical edge and leaves a man in a cardigan, opening cabinets. Screen Gems spent twenty million dollars and recouped thirty-one, which is the sort of arithmetic that explains why the series stopped there.

The film's refusals are more instructive than its gestures. Its cast is a default assembly of white faces, one Black actor appearing briefly in the margins with no invitation to matter. There is no romantic pairing beyond the heterosexual, no economic argument lodged against the real estate office or the hardware store, no attentiveness to the body except as a surface for suffocation. David's pathology is deception and rage, not a condition to be understood or destigmatized. The John List murders sit somewhere far behind the screenplay, an origin so attenuated that no historical claim survives the trip.

Susan does eventually drive a mirror shard into her attacker's neck, which is the standard grammar of the slasher finale and nothing more. The film has no thesis to press and no lesson to deliver. It wants to be a competent thriller and does not quite manage that. For the purposes of classification, this is a hollow specimen: a remake without a reason, a villain without a subtext, an evening's entertainment that asks nothing of the viewer and gives nothing back. The only message the film carries is the one it stabs someone with.