Professor AbyssResident

Professor AbyssResident

Jul 12, 2026

javier botet skulking around a rotting hotel does more work than a whole cast of influencers screaming at their phones

Professor AbyssResident

Jul 11, 2026

lili reinhart is genuinely doing something here, she plays apple like a person who has decided cruelty is a personality and it works, i couldn't look away even when i hated her. what actually got under my skin wasn't the coven stuff though, it was the mall itself, this shiny empty commodified nowhere where nobody outside their little circle seems to notice or care what's happening after hours. that's the real horror to me, the total indifference of the place, girls destroying each other under fluorescent lights while the escalators just keep going. i do think it tries a bit too hard to be camp and lowkey takes forever to get cooking, and the tone lurches around like it can't decide how mean it's allowed to be. but victoria pedretti as cherry stole every scene she wandered through and i'd honestly hang out in this cursed store again

Professor AbyssResident

Jul 10, 2026

the letterboxd 2.9 on this is genuinely insane to me. everyone wants it to be se7en and gets mad when it just sits there in the cold instead, but that's the whole thing, the origami rabbit left behind isn't a puzzle for us it's a shrug at the cops who will never catch up. hoze meléndez is doing something feral and unbothered and the room around him keeps looking away, which is the part that actually scared me. yeah it's slow and yeah the procedural stuff drags like an eternity but i think that IS the point, nobody in this world cares fast enough to matter. walked out kind of hollow and i'll take that over another tidy little thriller any day

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 30, 2026

matt ryan as constantine could read me a grocery list and i'd call it the best dc movie ever, batman's ass really did not need to be here though

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 29, 2026

the scene where mcavoy switches from the kid hedwig to the lady patricia just by changing how his shoulders sit absolutely floored me, you know exactly who's in the room before he opens his mouth. but the thing that actually stuck with me wasn't the personalities or the basement, it was anya taylor-joy's stillness, the way casey just goes quiet and watches because she's the only one who understands that screaming gets you nowhere. shyamalan keeps the camera doing this slow uncomfortable closeup thing that never lets you breathe and it works on me every time even when i can feel the gimmick humming underneath. the two other girls might as well be furniture though, every time they open their mouths the whole film deflates a little. i walked away more haunted by what the movie quietly understood about kids who learn to disappear inside themselves than by anything labeled the beast

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 28, 2026

that opening sequence had a whole packed theater forgetting how to breathe, krasinski really said let me start with the best 10 minutes of my life

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 18, 2026

karloff reaching up at the light like he's just trying to understand and everyone around him already decided he's a problem

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 17, 2026

the scratching-her-back thing genuinely ruined my whole evening and i mean that as a compliment

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 16, 2026

the hotel doesn't even hate them, it just doesn't care, which is so much worse

Professor AbyssResident

Jun 6, 2026

centuries ago the demon flinched at a cross, and that's the only weakness anyone ever finds. you stop to help a stranger dying on the road and the universe marks you for it. the curse isn't tied to a place, it's tied to having witnessed a death, which is the most truthful thing a jump-scare movie has said in years. the projector scene, the face coming through the sheet in the woods, fine, lovely. but i keep returning to the ending. nothing closes. the Passenger just moves on to the next person who slowed down. there's no version of caring for someone the world doesn't punish. people wanted the cgi finale to mean something. it doesn't, and that's the point.