114 min | R | January 14, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Twenty-five years after the Woodsboro murders, a new Ghostface picks up the knife and starts gutting teenagers who share the wrong last names. The killer is a film buff. So is the movie.
A new Ghostface stalks Woodsboro and targets people connected to the original killings. The victims are young. The legends are old. Sam Carpenter returns to the town she fled, dragging a family secret behind her, while the survivors of the first massacre get pulled back into a story they thought they finished. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett build the film as a direct argument about legacy sequels and the fans who police them. The movie is about toxic fandom and the violence of people who think they own a story.
Melissa Barrera plays Sam with guarded intensity and a buried rage that the script slowly uncovers. She carries the dramatic weight while everyone around her trades horror trivia. Jenna Ortega plays her sister Tara and opens the film with a sustained terror sequence that establishes the stakes early. Jasmin Savoy Brown plays Mindy Meeks-Martin as the movie’s rulebook, narrating the mechanics of a “requel” while the plot executes them. Jack Quaid plays Richie with an eager nervousness that the film uses against the audience. Courteney Cox returns as Gale Weathers with the same predatory ambition that defined her decades earlier.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett stage the kills with patience instead of shock. The camera holds on doorways and dead space behind the actors so the threat lives at the edge of the frame. The script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick keeps the dialogue self-aware without letting the references replace the suspense. The directors reuse the franchise’s signature kitchen geography and let familiar rooms become traps for people who think they know the layout. The sound design weaponizes the Ghostface voice modulation by letting silence sit between the threats.
This is a competent relaunch that understands its own purpose and never reaches past it. The meta-commentary lands because the film commits to its thesis about entitled fans demanding the story they want. The new cast is strong enough to justify the handoff from the original survivors. The scares stay inside the lines the franchise drew long ago. The film honors the formula and refuses to break it, which is both the point and the limit.