The Wrath of Becky (2023)

The sequel to a modest 2020 home-invasion picture arrives with a leaner running time and a broader grin, and there is something almost admirable in how little it pretends to be about anything. Becky, now sixteen, has traded one foster placement for another and settled into a quiet arrangement with a kindly older woman named Elena. Then a militia called the Noble Men kicks the door in, shoots Elena, and takes the dog. What follows is a series of mousetrap kills executed with crossbows, grenades, bear spray, and a machete, staged with the deadpan efficiency of a homeowner dealing with a wasp nest.

The film's cultural footprint is faint but legible. The villains are neo-Nazi-adjacent extremists plotting an armed insurrection against a senator named Hernandez, which gives the mayhem a political sheen without ever stopping to examine race as anything more than a casting note. Becky herself is a teenage girl methodically dismantling misogynists, and the picture is co-directed by Suzanne Coote, so a certain girl-power current runs beneath the gore. It never lectures. The men are loathsome, they say loathsome things, and then they are dispatched, which is the entire argument. Denise Burse and Derek Gaines appear in support, and the ensemble is pleasant without being a statement.

Everything else registers as zero. No climate anxiety, no class rage, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no historical revisionism, and no sermonizing beyond the obvious satisfaction of watching awful people get what the genre promises them. What remains is a tight, mean, occasionally hilarious piece of work that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize. The critics were mostly kind. They were right to be. The dog survives.