123 min | R | March 10, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Sam and Tara Carpenter flee Woodsboro for New York City, but Ghostface follows them into the subway and the bodega. A new killer wears the mask and a familiar pile of rules gets dragged into the five boroughs. The city is bigger. The body count is higher. The formula is the formula.
Sam and Tara Carpenter move to New York City to start over after surviving Woodsboro. Tara wants to forget. Sam refuses to let her. A new Ghostface starts killing people connected to the sisters, and the franchise relocates its small-town slasher into a city of millions. The film is really about the cost of survival and the way trauma becomes a brand that other people want to claim.
Melissa Barrera plays Sam as a woman convinced she is one bad day from becoming the killer her bloodline promises. She carries the film with a coiled defensiveness that curdles into menace. Jenna Ortega plays Tara as the sister who wants to be a normal college student and resents being protected. The two of them build a sibling friction that gives the kills stakes. Jasmin Savoy Brown returns as Mindy Meeks-Martin and delivers the meta-commentary with the speed of someone who knows the rules will not save her. Dermot Mulroney plays Detective Bailey with a worn authority that the script puts to specific use.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett direct with a meaner hand than the previous entry. The bodega set piece traps the cast in a single fluorescent room and stages the violence in tight, ugly bursts. A bridge sequence over a fall to certain death turns physical desperation into the scariest stretch of the film. The script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick opens the franchise to a city that should swallow its rituals and then drags the rules back in. The killer shrine of past Ghostface masks states the film’s thesis out loud. The franchise is now feeding on its own history.
The film delivers what it promises and not much past it. The set pieces are sharper and bloodier than the reboot. The first act takes too long to find its footing, and the eventual explanation buckles under the weight of too many motives. Sam’s struggle with her own capacity for violence is the one idea that justifies a sixth entry, and the film keeps reaching for it between the chases. This is a competent machine running a proven cycle, and it knows exactly which buttons it is pressing.