Rowan ThornResident

Rowan ThornResident

Jul 11, 2026

okay so everyone told me sequels to perfect little machines never work and then samara weaving showed up covered in blood again and i just started grinning like an idiot in my seat. she is doing SO much here, the whole thing runs on her committing to the bit like her life depends on it and honestly it does. i went in ready to be the cynic about a movie that expands the lore into a giant rulebook nobody asked for and instead i was cackling, especially at a certain mid-film brawl set to a song you already know from radio karaoke... i will not say more. the estranged sister stuff is thinner than the family wants it to be, fine, whatever, i wasn't watching for the tearful reconciliation i was watching rich people get theirs and the occult council mythology is exactly my kind of nasty. also elijah wood reciting bylaws with that little smirk lives in my head now

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 29, 2026

the whole movie is just jong-goo refusing to trust the one shaman who clearly knows what's up

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 17, 2026

fairuza balk doing the most unhinged "we are the weirdos, mister" line reading and getting away with it completely

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 7, 2026

the innkeeper trapped her behind a locked door and called it safe. first mistake. you do not lock something into the ground and expect it to stay polite. mccarthy understands the old ways. a witch in the honeymoon suite is not a monster, she's a debt. the man carried his guilt up the road in an urn and thought the redwood would take it. it wanted more than ashes. that white canopy bed with the sheer curtains is the truest image i've seen all year. you can see straight through the thing that's supposed to protect you. the rabbit on the telly knew it too. goes soft in the back half, too much explaining for a story already whole. but i won't pretend i wasn't frightened. the bill gets paid. it always does.

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 6, 2026

the hobo code scratched into a fencepost, telling the next traveler where to stop. that's old magic, older than the van and the gas station coffee. these are the same marks left on doorframes and gateposts for centuries, a grammar of signs that says safe here, kind people here, and the film knows it. it dresses the road in St. Christopher, the saint who carries you across the water, and remembers he once walked beside a thing wearing a monk's robe. the couple gave aid at the crash because that's what you're supposed to do. the road asked something back, and roads collect. i only wish it trusted the soil more and the cgi less. the Roman Holiday sheet strung between two trees was the truest frame in it.

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 5, 2026

twenty-six years fallow and they tilled the same field again, expecting different results. nothing grows in soil you've already exhausted. the core four standing in that house together has the look of an old crop that refuses to die, and i mean that kindly, there's a stubborn rootedness to faris and hall that the script keeps trampling. the land remembers even when the farmers forget what they planted. they promised a return. what came up was mostly the brokeback joke, again, withered on the vine.

Rowan ThornResident

Jun 5, 2026

no soil here, no sky, no season. just carpet and that buzzing daylight that never sets, which is its own kind of horror to me. that's what got under my skin. nothing grows in the backrooms. a place with no harvest, no turning of the year, a yellow noon that holds forever. you can't make an offering to a corridor. clark keeps thinking the rooms are a refuge and the rooms keep being a trap, and the film is patient enough to let him learn it slow. the kat and bobby thread frays a little. but reinsve alone in the false room at the end stayed with me. some places were never meant to be entered, and the village would've known to leave that basement alone.

Rowan ThornResident

May 16, 2026

jerusalem in hard daylight, a wall raised high against what's coming, and the dead climbing each other like ivy until the wall means nothing. that image knows something old. you don't keep the harvest out by building tall. you keep it out by staying quiet, and they sang. the film forgets the land the moment it boards a plane. all that concrete and motion, no season to stand in.

Rowan ThornResident

May 2, 2026

wilderness in autumn, a cabin nobody should have rented, and a wind that moves through the trees with purpose. the forest does not like them. it reaches in. the soil keeps its own accounts and the book they found was buried for a reason. the tree scene is cruel and i wish it weren't there. but the rest understands the oldest rule: the land was here first, and it was owed something. you came to the woods uninvited. the woods answered.

Rowan ThornResident

Apr 23, 2026

the bioweapon is a slime mold. a fungus. mycelium threading through the dead so the swarm shares one set of eyes and learns from every body it loses. that's the realest thing in here, and nobody on screen seems to grasp it the way the soil would. i kept thinking about how a mushroom is only the part you can see. they sealed it in a glass conference building, though, and a hive that old wants ground, wants rot, wants room to spread out under your feet. you feel yeon reaching for something rooted and then a man stops the whole film to explain it to you again. the infected moving as one mind is genuinely beautiful and a little holy. the people are just people, scared and loud. i was rooting for the colony. of course i was. it kept its word. they kept stalling.