You're Next (2013)
Directed by Adam Wingard
No — You're Next is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Adam Wingard's You're Next arrives with the tidy indifference of a well-oiled trap.
Consciousness Markers
Erin is a genuinely capable, self-sufficient horror heroine raised in a survivalist compound who dispatches nearly every antagonist herself, and she has been widely celebrated as a top-tier female genre lead. The film, however, presents this as genre craft and character competency rather than as an argument about gender.
The twist hinges on brothers hiring assassins to murder their family for an inheritance, and the keywords flag 'greed' — but this is intimate familial avarice in service of a horror plot, not a systemic indictment of capital.
The cast is overwhelmingly white, and the lone Black character (Tariq) exists chiefly to be the first victim of the crossbow bolt, a hoary slasher trope played entirely straight. No deliberate casting as statement is present.
No LGBTQ+ characters, subtext, or thematic material of any kind appear in the film.
The film engages with no racial themes whatsoever; the early death of its one Black character is a slasher convention, not commentary.
No environmental themes or climate content appear in the film.
No body-positive themes or messaging are present; the film is a lean, blood-soaked home-invasion thriller.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present in the film.
The film makes no historical claims or revisions; it is a contemporary, wholly fictional genre exercise.
You're Next lectures no one. It is a ruthless, pitch-black genre machine — Agatha Christie mechanics and screwball-family sniping wired to carnage — with zero didactic ambition.
Why it received this score
Adam Wingard's You're Next arrives with the tidy indifference of a well-oiled trap. A family gathers at a rural Missouri vacation home for an anniversary dinner, the sniping begins before the appetizers, and within twenty minutes a crossbow bolt is passing through the window. The screenplay, by Simon Barrett, borrows its architecture from Agatha Christie and its dialogue from screwball comedy, then wires both to a meat tenderizer. It is a machine, and it knows it.
The machine's finest component is Erin, played by Sharni Vinson with a flat competence the genre rarely permits. Raised in a survivalist compound, she stabs, bludgeons, and improvises her way through nearly every masked assailant, and her efficiency has earned her a durable place in the horror canon. We should be careful about what this represents. Erin is a well-built character in a well-built thriller, not a thesis. The film offers no argument about gender and no commentary on the arrangement of power. It simply declines to make her useless, which in 2013 counted as a novelty.
Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The lone Black character, Tariq, takes a crossbow bolt before the first act closes, a convention the film executes without a flicker of self-awareness. The villains turn out to be brothers contracting assassins for an inheritance, a greed that stays domestic and never widens into a case against anything larger. There is no environmental sermon, no body-positive aside, no neurodivergent arc, no historical correction, and no lecture. The film has no interest in improving anyone. It wants to kill the cast in inventive order, and it does so with a straight face.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
When the Davison family comes under attack during their wedding anniversary getaway, the gang of mysterious killers soon learns that one of their victims harbors a secret talent for fighting back.
Questions about You're Next
Is You're Next woke?
No — You're Next is not woke, scoring 9 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does You're Next have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Feminist Agenda at 25.
How does You're Next compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #127 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.