105 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Michael Myers survives the fire that was supposed to end him and walks back into Haddonfield. The town that spent forty years afraid of him decides to stop running and hunt him down. The mob turns out to be almost as dangerous as the man in the mask, and the movie is too busy pointing that out to scare you.
Halloween Kills picks up the same night the previous film ends. Laurie Strode burns Michael Myers in her basement and rides to the hospital believing she has finished him. Michael walks out of the flames and resumes the work. The film wants to be about a town turning into a mob, about trauma metastasizing into rage that hunts the wrong targets. It states that thesis out loud, again and again, instead of trusting the audience to feel it.
Jamie Lee Curtis spends most of the film as Laurie Strode in a hospital bed recovering from surgery. The trilogy’s center is sidelined to a gurney while she delivers speeches about evil. Judy Greer plays Karen Nelson with a restraint that the script keeps trying to break, and she is the one performer who finds real fear in a quiet hallway. Anthony Michael Hall plays a grown Tommy Doyle as the man who rallies the town with a bullhorn and a chant of “Evil dies tonight.” Will Patton brings weariness to Officer Hawkins, and James Jude Courtney moves The Shape with a deliberate, unhurried weight that remains the most genuinely menacing thing on screen.
David Gordon Green directs from a script he wrote with Danny McBride and Scott Teems, and the film commits to brutality with a clarity the story never matches. The kills are staged in long, unbroken takes that let violence breathe and refuse to cut away. Green floods the climactic mob scene with hospital fluorescents and harsh overhead light that drains the warmth out of every face. The score leans on John Carpenter’s piano motif and then crushes it under synth drones during the crowd sequences. The craft serves spectacle. It does not serve coherence.
The film keeps stopping to explain itself. Characters announce the theme, flashbacks fill in the 1978 night with new faces, and the mob storyline runs on a single repeated idea. The brutality lands and a few set pieces hold real tension. Underneath them is a middle chapter that marks time until the next film, padding a thin plot with sermons about fear. The result is loud, mean, and curiously inert.