Ghostface slices up the big apple.
Relocating the bloody business of Ghostface’s legacy from the sleepy, picket-fenced trappings of Woodsboro to the claustrophobic verticality of New York City provides Scream VI with a needed shot of adrenaline following the creatively bankrupt “requel” that was Scream, Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett return with a sequel that manages to be a marginal step up, primarily because it remembers to be a tense slasher movie before it remembers to be an indulgent lecture on cinema – at least for a while. When it’s good, it’s a film that exploits the inherent anxieties of urban living: the anonymity of crowds, the labyrinthine layouts of walk-up apartments, and the specific, flickering dread of a late-night subway carriage.
Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) have traded their hometown trauma for a Blackmore University education, accompanied by fellow survivors Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding). While Scream suffered from a certain woodenness in its lead, Barrera is noticeably more comfortable here, leaning into the darker, more violent impulses that the script suggests are her birthright even if warmth and humanity remain seemingly out of reach. The “Core Four” dynamic feels authentically cringy, creating a more recognisable bond than the interchangeable victimhood of the 2022 cast. This is a group you might actually want to survive a near-gutting in a bodega. Ortega, in particular, continues to prove she is the franchise’s most valuable player, providing the emotional weight and stakes that Barrera seems disinterested in,
The change in location offers opportunities for new set pieces, a chance to move away from the tired choreography of previous sequels. A high rise ladder bridge, a packed Halloween subway train, a glitzy executive condo all offer venues for thrilling sequences that at least feel fresh if not groundbreaking. In these moments, Scream VI feels like it has finally found a pulse of its own, separate from the nostalgic life-support of everything that’s gone before.
Unfortunately, Scream VI remains even more obsessed with its own fiction history than any of the characters. The opening scene, featuring Samara Weaving as the by-now traditional big name first kill, has variations – the instant unmasking of the Ghostface killer only for him in turn to be slaghtered by the actual Scream VI Ghostface but underpinning it all is a sense of replication and repetition that on its own feels like a prescient preemptive satire of LLM Generative AI. There’s nothing new here, just an endless remix and reshuffling of what’s gone before until the film abandons all pretence of subtlety and funnels the characters into a literal museum of franchise history, a secret shrine filled with costumes, weapons, and evidence from every previous film. It’s a sequence that feels less like a natural evolution of the story and more like a contrived attempt to tie into every single aspect of the property’s past done with the same crassness as James Bond attempted with SPECTRE and then again with No Time To Die. It feels cheap. It feels unearned. It feels desperate. Scream VI has a frantic need to validate its bona fides through constant association with Wes Craven’s legacy, which results in a third act that feels suffocated by its own mythology. The revelation of the killer’s identity and their subsequent motivation is one of the most convoluted in the franchise’s history as is the regularity with which the supposed dead stage a surprise revival, suggesting that Ghostface may well as well tie his knife to a yo-yo.
Courteney Cox’s return as Gale Weathers at least delivers a proper confrontation with a Ghostface that carries some genuine bite, but the credibility of her continued involvement feels increasingly stretched. The inclusion of Hayden Panettiere’s Kirby Reed, brought back from Scream 4, adds to the film’s “more is more” approach to fan service and while her presence is welcome, her muddled back story feels like just another clumsy attempt to retcon more memorabilia into an already overstuffed exhibition.
Of course, the one intriguing – if preposterous – plotline established in Scream and further developed in Scream VI: Sam’s slide into psychopathy, serial killing as genetic inheritance, is itself cruelly cut short by an ending which all but promises that Sam herself will become Ghostface in the next installment, as long as she keeps her geopolitical opinions to herself. That sequel, which we’ll never see now, where she would have presumably started preying on Tara and friends until being unmasked and probably (sigh) redeemed, feels like it could have been a genuine evolution of the franchise’s themes. A pity, then that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett decided to take the scenic route in setting up the story with a too-heavy foundation of callbacks instead of getting on with it. Scream, like most legacy franchises at the moment, seems to be incapable of looking to the future, preferring to continually look to its past for familiar comfort and fan service, and that may prove more fatal for Ghostface than even a bullet to the head..
