111 min | R | October 14, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Laurie Strode is writing her memoirs. Michael Myers has not been seen in four years. David Gordon Green ends his trilogy by handing the franchise to a man nobody asked for.
Haddonfield has decided that Michael Myers is gone. Laurie Strode lives with her granddaughter and bakes pies and works on a book. The town has turned its grief into cruelty and found a new target in Corey Cunningham, a young man blamed for an accidental death. David Gordon Green builds the film around Corey instead of Michael, and the real subject becomes how a community manufactures its own monsters. This is a slasher movie that spends most of its time refusing to be a slasher movie.
Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie as a woman trying to convince herself the trauma is over. She softens the survivalist edge from the previous films and lets exhaustion show through. Rohan Campbell plays Corey with a wounded passivity that curdles into something darker as the town keeps punishing him. Andi Matichak plays Allyson as drawn to Corey for the same reasons everyone else fears him. James Jude Courtney returns as The Shape but spends much of the film in a sewer, sidelined by his own movie. Will Patton grounds the proceedings as Officer Hawkins, the lone adult who senses what is coming.
Green directs from a script he wrote with Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, and Danny McBride. The early stretch leans on warm autumnal light and steady framing that makes Haddonfield feel like an ordinary town hiding rot. John Carpenter returns to score with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies, and the synth work pulses with menace even when the screen offers none. The problem is structural. The film commits to Corey’s slow descent and then remembers it owes the audience a confrontation between Laurie and Michael, and the two halves never fuse into one movie.
The ambition is real. Green tries to end a fifty-year horror franchise with a thesis about evil as something a town breeds rather than a man in a mask. The thesis is more interesting than the execution. By the time the film delivers the showdown its title promises, it has spent its energy on a character it introduced ninety minutes earlier. This is a finale that wants to say something profound about Haddonfield and forgets that people came to see Michael Myers.