Comrade Courant Culture Critic

The Home (2025): A Muddled Asylum Thriller That Finds Catharsis in Chaos "A thriller that forgets to explain its own rules—but ends with a gloriously messy revenge splatter." — 2.5/5 Stars The Home (2025) review: James DeMonaco—director of The Purge —trades social satire for psychological horror in this muddled asylum thriller that stumbles through its narrative but lands hard in its final act. Set in a decaying psychiatric facility, it follows Max (Pete Davidson), a lost young man who takes a job as an orderly and quickly finds himself drowning in conspiracies, gaslighting, and escalating violence. I went in with low expectations—and honestly, I still had fun. Not because it’s coherent, but because it commits so fully to its own unraveling. That said, it fails to recapture the thematic clarity or cultural punch that made The Purge franchise resonate. If you’re looking for sharper horror thi...

  'Borgman': A Sinister Masterpiece That Deserves Wider Recognition "Dutch auteur Alex van Warmerdam crafts a haunting surrealist thriller that's been criminally overlooked" — 5/5 Stars "And they descended upon the Earth to strengthen their ranks." Borgman (2013) review: As it opens we are met with those eerie biblical words (in Dutch), and van Warmerdam pulls us into a world of equally eerie images. We see a hunting party, looking like they've stepped out of another century, moving through the woods. They're armed with spears, accompanied by a barking dog, and one of them—a priest, no less—carries a shotgun. It's immediately clear they're hunting something wicked, and that this thing lives underground. It's a fever dream beginning that immediately signals we're not in familiar territory—and it's only the tip of the iceberg in what stands as one ...

  A Beautiful, Frustrating Near-Miss from Oz Perkins, Longlegs (2024) "A visually hypnotic horror-thriller that doesn't quite deliver on its promise" — 3.5/5 Stars From the first frame, Longlegs lets you know you're in the hands of a visual stylist. Director Oz Perkins paints with shadows and light in a way that feels both meticulously crafted and dangerously unhinged. The aspect ratios shift like moods, the lighting schemes evoke everything from 70s conspiracy thrillers to Scandinavian nightmares. There are moments of pure cinematic sorcery here—sequences so visually arresting they momentarily make you forget you're watching a movie and instead feel like you've stumbled into someone's fever dream. But like the best fever dreams, Longlegs starts to fray at the edges when you try to make sense of it. The setup is classic procedural: Maika Monroe's FBI agent Lee Hark...