After her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) is attacked by Ghostface, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) returns home to Woodsboro.
As the town grapples with a new killing spree, Sam is forced to confront a ghost from her past…
“I’ve seen this movie before”
The fifth Scream is the first real break from the past - Kevin Williamson was not behind the script, and Wes Craven sadly passed away in 2015.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the team behind 2019’s Ready or Not, and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick stepped in.
The gaps in between each entry’s release acted as ellipses - time has passed; people experience change, new trends in the genre have taken over…
Taken in overview to this point, there is something kind of right about having a new Scream every decade to comment on the state of the horror genre.
On the surface, Scream V is following this pattern, with a new story based around the concept of legacy sequels (original cast as supporting players around a new cast).
The opening sequence is a neat little tee up for new viewers. It is nothing that groundbreaking but as a way of setting the table, it is fine. What boosts the scene’s effectiveness is that it is based around 2022’s scream queen Jenna Ortega, whose committed performance gives the scene an added sense of verisimilitude.
Around the point where Randy’s niece Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is explaining the concept of ‘requels’, my skin crawled.
There is something false about this movie, a superficial adherence to the tenants of the franchise, but it is missing something. This movie starts to resemble one of the series’ antagonists - pretending to be something relatable and human, but underneath it all, there is nothing.
I had done a marathon of the Screams last year, and at that time, I really enjoyed Scream V. Tonally, it felt like it was of a piece with the previous movies, and the return of the central cast felt like natural progressions from the last installment.
The biggest problem is the same problem with almost all legacy sequels - the adherence to the parameters of what came before means the world of the movie, especially the characters, has become really small and incestuous.
The other element that stands out is characterisation. This is not a criticism of the cast.
In the original Scream, the characters had clearly developed personalities and relationships. Even the smaller characters, like Henry Winkler’s principal, had specific motivations.
These characters have to carry a certain level of verisimilitude so that the skewering of genre can work, and the audience can be invested as the stakes increase.
They were also ordinary. Sidney Prescott was an ordinary person in the worst circumstances.
The characters in this entry are not given the space to just be people. Instead they have to fit the preconceptions of the original movie.
This is particularly the case with central character Sam. We are introduced to her in medias res, outside her place of employment. We meet her boyfriend and once she gets back to Woodsboro, we learn that she had abandoned her sister and left town for unknown reasons.
Once she is reunited with Tara, Sam goes into an extended monologue in which she reveals that her real father was Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), one half of the killer duo from the original movie - and the person who attacked Tara knows it
There are good bones for drama here.
There is something real about learning a key part of your past was a lie - this was an important element of the original Scream - but this time we do not get to see this affect Sam’s life. It has already happened.
I do not like using that word, but there is something so inelegant about the way we learn Sam’s story. It does not help that the actors have to convey their history together exclusively through dialogue, but there is also a pacing issue - it feels like too much trauma too quickly. We have already had Tara almost dying from getting stabbed a hundred times.
On reflection, it almost feels like the movie (and the characters) would have been better served by breaking out of the familiar narrative format, and starting with Sam and Tara before their revelations.
Melissa Barrera is fine, and has a good dynamic with Ortega, but there was something missing - some sense of context or development. It feels like she has already gone through a major change, and this part is the entree.
The supporting players are fine, but thinly sketched variants of their predecessors in earlier movies. Even as they begin to die, it does not feel like any of them is that affected. The only character who feels like they are reacting to people and events like a real person is Ortega - and that might just because she keeps getting beaten up.
On first viewing, Dewey’s death made for a great surprise jolt. On the rewatch, the treatment of this character comes across as rather callous.
The way the character is introduced - an alcoholic living alone in a trailer - makes it feel like the movie is going to be built around Sam’s story, with Dewey’s redemption as the B plot.
While the amount of time between instalments helps, when it is revealed that Dewey left Gale because he could not hack the big city, it feels off with our knowledge of the character. Gale even says he was not a coward.
It is such a weird compromise that I thought we were going to learn something else - maybe his PTSD made it hard for him to feel at ease in the world.
It does not help that the character is made a joke for falling on hard times, and then makes a mistake that leads to his death.
Having a shock death of a familiar cast member is fine for part 5 of a franchise, but the treatment of Dewey feels disingenuous.
That underlying vacuous-ness is most evident in the film’s villains.
Toxic fandom makes sense as a starting point for a Scream antagonist, but there is nothing underneath it.
The previous movies’ villains had tangible motivations - misogyny, revenge, jealousy.
By contrast, these people are just obsessed with the franchise.
The film refers to toxic fandom but it has nothing to say about the subtext of such conservatism - instead the movie is a prime example of the thing it is.
When the third act takes place in the same location as the original, it does not carry any new meaning beyond the villains/filmmakers lacking anything new to say.
The villains act like facsimiles of the first two, and even Mikey Madison’s gleeful leer just reminds me of her performance as Sadie Atkins in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
This movie is not commenting on the genre - everything that is called back exists as a quotation, an echo, but with no new meaning.
And there is no sense of the characters interacting with or confronting the role social media or popular culture plays in their lives.
The further away one gets from Scream V, the more insignificant it feels.
When a movie’s influences become itself alone, then there is nothing to engage with. Maybe that is the most horrific takeaway the movie gives you.
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