At the time of this review, I have only seen the first half of You Season 4 (2023). As a disclaimer, this review is for the first five episodes, which arrived last month on Netflix. As many streaming services do these days, this most recent season saw a bifurcated release, with the remaining episodes dropping today on Netflix.

My best guess for the delayed release date of the second half of this season is that the streaming giant is relying on the same word of mouth to sell their buzziest IP once again to new and old fans alike. And the word of mouth, at least anecdotally within my real life and social media circles, is that nobody’s really talking about You anymore. Was the serial killer melodrama a flash in the pan? 

For whatever it’s worth, I’d hoped it wouldn’t be. When it originally debuted in 2017 (on Lifetime, of all networks, before moving to Netflix) You was a fresh of breath air. Beautifully shot, literary but unpretentious, cleverly scripted with some of the best millennial satire on television since Lena Dunham’s Girls ended that same year. And most importantly: it featured Joe Goldberg, TV’s most delusional serial killer since Dexter Morgan. I’ve been a fan for a while, even dressing up as Joe for Halloween one year. I went on to enjoy season 2’s skewering of Los Angeles nepo baby culture, then season 3’s take on the crowd-pleasing if played-out subject of suburbia’s dark underbelly.

Season 4 is a departure from the series’ usual M.O., dropping Joe into a London whodunit, investigating what the UK media dubs the “Eat the Rich Murders.” Once a predator, Joe finds himself playing defense, balancing detective work with his new life on the run. It’s possible that the writers feared formula fatigue when between seasons they turned Joe from stalker and serial murderer to a docile stranger in a strange land, but series star Penn Badgley’s interview junket tells a different story. 

Badgley claimed that he wanted to move away from his character’s obsessive, codependent persona, and away from Joe’s characterization as a psychopath who considers himself to be a hopeless romantic out of loyalty to his offscreen, real-life marriage. The result is an antihero who’s relatively sexless and nonviolent compared to his portrayal in the first three seasons, a change that almost fits with the stuffy, upper crust London of season 4. 

There’s a lot to enjoy about the latest installment of You. The location shoots are a nice return to the show’s settings pre-COVID restrictions. The ensemble is on par with any of the casts post-season 1 (with the major exception of Victoria Pedretti and Jenna Ortega, who are sorely missed here). The writing is… okay, and Badgley continues to sell an increasingly silly script as best he can. But the cracks are starting to show, and You may have officially overstayed its welcome.

I don’t have a problem with the pivot to whodunit, but for a series as glossy and well-oiled as this one, whose production values stand with the best original fare Netflix has to offer, the overarching plot needs to match up. Throughout these ten episodes, the writers insist they’re telling an Agatha Christie story, though nothing in season 4 resembles Christie’s work in the slightest. How about a London Fields riff? Martin Amis’ most famous novel—a murder mystery as told by an American abroad—shares far more DNA with Joe’s London holiday. 

Or why not drop London altogether and send Joe to Italy? If you want a season inspired by European psychosexual slasher thrillers, what better micro genre to pay tribute to than giallo? Much of the early appeal of You came from its genre savviness and literary influences which helped elevate it above its soapy contemporaries, and gave it the staying power to last as long as it has. Joe Goldberg may be a survivor, but this is one series that needs to get just a little bit smarter if it wants to stay off the Netflix chopping block.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022) quietly dropped all eight of its episodes on Netflix this Friday, and by Saturday morning I’d binged the whole thing. It’s a show that makes for perfect background noise—I folded laundry, vacuumed, changed my cat’s litter, and did a light workout—but it’s not going to hold the interest of those few brave streamers who don’t text or scroll Twitter while watching vaguely entertaining garbage. 

I wanted to like this miniseries, starring the ever-likable Kristen Bell as a woman living out the story of a hacky thriller novel, but The Woman in the House never gives viewers any sense of whether they’re meant to enjoy it in earnest, laugh at its occasional sight gags, or get invested in its mystery. 

The title, which I’m not going to type out again because it’s just too long, feels like an allusion to the Wayans brothers parody micro genre that dominated the late 90s and 00s, such as Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Like the Wayans brothers’ most successful film, Scary Movie, The Woman in the House borrows most of its plot from existing genre entries, mostly The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train. 

In theory, it’s a great choice of genre to send up, since the era of the domestic thriller has begun to wane following a slew of uninspired, derivative Gone Girl-lites and Big Little Lies-adjacent also-rans. 

The problem is that The Woman in the House has virtually nothing to say. Its principal murder mystery is never engaging, its heroine (Kristen Bell) is a traumatized alcoholic agoraphobe (sorta, in this version she’s specifically afraid of the rain) who doesn’t play the role nearly as believably as forebears like Amy Adams or Emily Blunt, and the jokes (because, again, this is a parody, apparently) are few and far between. 

The Woman in the House is an eight-episode comedy miniseries with less than five real jokes per episode. The main sight gag is that Kristen Bell fills her wine glasses up to the very brim—very funny the first time around, less so each instance after. There’s an extended, awkward finger-printing scene. The way the protagonist’s daughter dies is so ridiculously absurd that it could potentially be hilarious in a goofier, David Zucker-style spoof; unfortunately, the frequent tonal shifts leave this reveal shockingly macabre at best, tasteless at worst. 

Would I recommend The Woman in the House to anyone? I don’t know, maybe if you have a lot of laundry to fold or surfaces to vacuum and you can’t listen to music because your headphones are charging. Otherwise, A Simple Favor is a much better genre parody, as is Gone Girl, which ironically works as a satire on thrillers and our national obsession with true crime, despite singlehandedly inspiring a slate of uninspired rip-offs. 

Seriously, the thriller genre as we know it today (as we’re never going back to ‘90s mid-budget thrillers like Single White Female or Basic Instinct since Hollywood has an aversion now to premises that don’t involve an unreliable narrator with trauma who may have seen something she shouldn’t) peaked with Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl and the Sharp Objects miniseries are both practically perfect, as is her 2018 film Widows. Her other adaptation, Dark Places, was pretty terrible, but infinitely more original than The Woman in the House. 

Watch any of those instead, or David Fincher’s Panic Room, or Wes Craven’s Red Eye. Just don’t bother with a spoof that only sporadically remembers it’s supposed to be funny. 

Scream (2022) is a blast. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the early reviews lauding it as the best franchise entry since the 1996 original, but I’ll admit I had my doubts going in, probably due to a series of weak trailers that failed to capture this film’s freshness and originality. It turns out that the trailers were cut to reveal as little as possible; they spoil one major kill, but otherwise leave viewers largely in the dark. 

And you will want to be in the dark going into Scream, so I will do my best to avoid almost every spoiler, except for one: Jenna Ortega’s character, Tara, survives the opening scene and goes on to become the film’s new scream queen, like Neve Campbell and Emma Roberts before her. What initially feels like a cop-out a la the MTV Scream series, which notoriously shied away from killing off most of its leads to allow them to allow them to appear in future installments is actually a brilliant subversion of the formula in place since the original. This Scream has a light focus on franchise-building, with its meta, exposition-machine characters drawing comparisons to 2018’s Halloween and even the Star Wars sequels. 

Yet it still works perfectly as a standalone sequel. If you walk into the theater having only seen the first film, Scream makes perfect sense, though longtime fans will be rewarded with a handful of blink-and-you-miss-it Easter eggs alongside some very unsubtle homages. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who previously co-directed 2019’s Ready or Not, find the perfect balance for new and returning cast members. Unlike in Scream 4, Sidney, Dewey, and Gale take a backseat to a new set of high schooler victims. 

This time around, the high schoolers are Gen Z kids with fairly realistic Gen Z opinions on the changing landscape of horror: they prefer Hereditary and Babadook to slashers and reboots, all while fighting to survive a slasher reboot. The in-universe parody franchise “Stab” fails to enthrall most of these characters, despite being front and center in Scream 3 and 4. Thus, Ghostface is forced to reinvent himself here: his kills are more vicious than ever before; he plays with the themes of trauma and inherited mental illness that modern prestige horror favors over jump scares; he essentially creates his own meta “elevated horror” within the boundaries of a film that is unmistakably Scream. 

My one point of criticism: by the time we get to the final setpiece, a showdown at the Macher house that started it all, it’s blatantly obvious that this whole thing was shot on a soundstage rather than the Santa Rosa suburbs that we know to be the fictional Woodsboro. I’d argue that Woodsboro is a more iconic location than Elm Street or Haddonfield, so it’s a shame to see it represented here by a series of haunted house sets. 

One might wonder if this was an unfortunate consequence of COVID filming restrictions; however, Scream was shot in 2019, and shelved until it could have its time in the theaters. (As the omicron variant runs rampant, it’s hard to recommend anyone goes out to a movie theater… but wow, this moviegoing experience rivaled Spider-Man: No Way Home. We had a great crowd.)

Still, this film’s visual flaws will be far less obvious when it makes it onto streaming platforms, with TVs at home easily smoothing out the rough edges. The performances, particularly those of Mikey Madison, Jack Quaid, and the aforementioned Jenna Ortega, steal the show. I won’t spoil who the killer is—my friend Nick with whom I saw the film figured it out around the start of the third act, but I’ll admit I kept guessing and second-guessing—though I doubt anybody is going to leave disappointed. It’s a better reveal than Scream 3, 4, and arguably 2, partially because Scream at its core is a whodunit, and the series excels when it gives viewers the pieces of the puzzle instead of throwing us a killer out of nowhere and expecting their motive to make up for a cluster of plot holes. 

Scream is exactly what it needed to be in order to either reboot the franchise or give it a stronger, more full-circle ending than what we got in Scream 4. It’s almost a given at this point that Ghostface will be back, either in two years or ten, but until then, I am more than satisfied with this—to borrow a term used by this film’s characters—“requel.”

I first learned of Search Party (2016) at the start of the pandemic. The first two (incredible, original, witty and wonderful) seasons were available to binge on HBO Max, having originally aired on TBS, and the next three seasons were produced and released over the next year and a half. Having just finished the final, underwhelming season, I guess I’m just relieved that it’s over. 

It’s hard to talk about Search Party past season one without delving into spoiler territory, but let’s try. The basic premise of the show is that a group of disillusioned, underemployed millennials get caught up in a murder mystery after their college acquaintance disappears. 

Leading the charge is Dory Sief, a listless Brooklyn hipster with a milquetoast boyfriend and two hilarious, if pathologically narcissistic best friends. Aside from the whole murder plot, this show shares some common DNA with Girls, another HBO series which similarly featured selfish 20-somethings figuring out their place in the world. 

The second season is a psychological thriller that borrows heavily from Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo; the third is a courtroom drama; the fourth an abduction story; and the fifth and final season is, in theory, a suspenseful take on the rise and fall of a doomsday/pseudo-religious/sex cult. 

I say in theory because cult stories, while widely represented in docuseries from Tiger King to the bevy of NXIVM docs, really isn’t all that ripe for parody. Season 5 of Search Party betrays the number one rule of genre parody by forcing its characters into archetypes associated with the genre and thus undermining all of their previous development.

By the final moments of the series finale, Search Party has thrown out everything we love and love to hate about its principal cast and added—and this is a spoiler, but it’s so stupid that I’d be remiss not to mention it—zombies. 

That’s right, the funny murder mystery that once parodied cliches in the then-emerging TV thriller genre devolved into The Walking Dead. You just can’t do zombies in 2022, and you especially can’t put them into your occasionally surrealist but usually grounded half-hour comedy on a whim. So—zombies aside—what went wrong?

Well… yeah, it’s 2022. Zombies are stale, and so are half-assed critiques of millennials. They don’t want to work! They like tattoos and house plants! All these characters are pushing thirty now, and even The Atlantic has come around to apologizing for characterizing a generation living through the fall of Rome as responsible for said fall of the modern American Empire. This time around, Search Party takes one belated stab at poking fun at Gen Z TikTok influencers, and it falls short. Look, if this series had staying power, J. Smith-Cameron wouldn’t have jumped ship over to the far superior Succession.

This is a show that should have ended around its third or fourth season. In season five, it shows that it has nothing more to say, and resorts to unleashing zombies upon unsuspecting, tired viewers, as it finally becomes a zombie of its former self. 

Dexter: New Blood (2021) kicks off right where the original Dexter ended. Well, eight years later, allowing for some much needed evolution in Dexter Morgan’s character since what is widely regarded as the most disappointing series finale of all time. 

When we last saw Dexter, he was a lumberjack in upstate New York. He’d killed his “Dark Passenger,” the inner voice through which he projects his darkest desires alongside manifestations of his dead father. 

Returning to the snowy little NY hamlet in 2021, our favorite TV serial killer has put down roots. He’s living under the alias Jim, has a cop girlfriend (this won’t end well), and is a fixture in a small town thankfully not filmed on the distractingly recognizable Stars’ Hollow sound stage. Deb, his sister who was unceremoniously killed off in the 2013 finale, manifests as his guilty conscious, a substitution for his long dead father who used to play that role. 

A TV revival years after the fact is a tricky thing to pull off. Thankfully, this is closer to Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return than Fox’s Prison Break: Resurrection. It’s still unmistakably Showtime, like the former, and so it retains all the hallmarks of not-quite-prestige-TV that the original run of Dexter suffered from, but man is it great to see Michael C. Hall back in his best role. 

Smartphone apps and weed vapes are set dressing to remind us this show is set in the present—otherwise, it maintains the tone of the first four seasons of Dexter without retreading old territory. I started to film a particularly beautiful long take for my Snapchat story before a sudden twist shocked me into putting my phone down. It’s hard to go too in depth without spoiling the major plot points of the episode, so I’ll stick to discussing developments already spoiled by promotional materials:

Harrison is back, and he’s older now. We don’t yet know how he tracked Dexter—sorry, Jim—down, but I have an inkling we’ll see his adoptive mother appear later in the season, provided Yvonne Strahovski isn’t too busy in her own evolved role as the new Big Bad on Handmaid’s Tale. Dexter kills, again, for the first time in almost a decade, and the situation is a tad contrived but takes advantage of the episode’s slow deliberation to incorporate new set pieces which will undoubtedly return in future episodes. Chekhov’s gun does go off, but not when you’d expect.

All in all, Dexter: New Blood feels less needless than other recent revivals. Is that a good enough reason not to let sleeping dogs lie? Probably not, but John Lithgow is slated to return, so count me in for this new season as a pre-Succession apéritif every Sunday night.

Halloween Kills (2021) is a middle chapter that really, really wants to be a middle chapter. In an era of major franchises and event releases, you can almost forgive the writers and producers for milking as much money as they can out of a reliable IP, but too few interesting things happen to our leads—namely Jamie Lee Curtis—to give it the momentum a Chapter 2 requires leading into Chapter 3. 

Historically, the Halloween franchise has been at its best when it bills itself in duologies: the original 1978 and 1981 films, H20 and its sequel, Rob Zombie’s remake and its own take on Halloween II. An argument could be made that Halloween 4 and 5 are their own one-two punch, though the less is said about those installments the better. Halloween Kills sets out to be both a sequel to 2018’s Halloween while honoring the forty-year legacy of 1978’s Halloween (see where the titling gets exhausting?) and only succeeds at the latter, undermining its predecessor’s interpretation of Michael Meyers’ own legacy. 

At times, it reminded me of the polarizing eighth mainline Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, which ambitiously set out to reexamine the franchise’s mythos while accomplishing surprisingly little plot-wise in a nearly three-hour runtime. In 2018, Meyers’ return is written off as a nonevent in an era of true crime and mass shootings. Kills attempts to make the series villain much more threatening by having the entire town of Haddonfield shaken by Meyers’ killing spree, frenzied into an angry mob and ready to take the masked murderer down once and for all. Of course, we the audience know that Laurie Strode is the only one who can kill Michael Meyers—anything else would be anticlimactic, and there’s a third film planned—so this middle entry just feels like a way to kill time until the original scream queen is back on her feet. 

Like The Last Jedi so desperately wanted to avoid retreading Empire Strikes Back’s plot points, Halloween Kills knows it can’t spend too much time either with Laurie or in the hospital where she’s recovering, lest it draw unfair comparisons to Halloween II. The 1981 sequel is my personal favorite in the series, and its finality so that the franchise could move on to an anthology format (which would be quickly ditched after the lukewarm reception Season of the Witch perhaps unfairly received) is a major part of what makes it so great. Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers enter a hospital—and only one will leave alive! Sidestepping this plot, and sidestepping Jamie Lee Curtis almost entirely so that Meyers can kill underdeveloped side characters, is a misstep necessitated by Halloween Ends: coming 2022!

With all that said: there’s a lot of fun to be had in Halloween Kills. I loved the 1978 sequences that mimicked the filmic look of the original. The music is great as always, and some of the kills are as creative as they are brutal. The filmmakers play with several interpretations of Meyers as a villain, having demystified the character as a boogeyman exclusively haunting an older, tougher Laurie Strode’s nightmares in Halloween (2018). In Kills, he’s an unbeatable force of nature, the embodiment of evil, and, when he’s at his best, just a plain old (literally now) psychopath. In one scene, Meyers tests the resistance of a series of knives on a victim’s back with a cold deliberation reminiscent of Ex Machina’s unfeeling killer robot. The mob stuff is fun, though it requires a whole lot of tedious world-building and half-assed character development considering most if not all of the characters present lack franchise staying power. Judy Greer carries every scene she’s in as the daughter of Laurie Strode, nearly making up for the lack of Jamie Lee Curtis. Overall, Halloween Kills is a disappointing second act that nevertheless introduces some cool concepts and memorable setpieces—much like The Last Jedi. 

Lamb (2021) is the latest horror (or at least horror-adjacent) film from A24, the indie distribution juggernaut behind Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, Robert Eggers’ The VVitch and The Lighthouse, and films like The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Climax. I mention these out of a catalogue of over 100 releases since 2013 because they all contain elements of different genres, yet have been marketed as horror. In the case of the aforementioned films, this isn’t a bad strategy. Boasting indie, arthouse bonafides, no A24 film is going to be excluded from a conversation about “real cinema,” and most moviegoers left The Lighthouse, for example, without feeling deceived by false advertising. 

Lamb is by no means a perfect movie, and it is indeed a horror movie, but it suffers from audience expectations. For starters, it’s a slow burn—about as slow as you can get. The principal cast for the bulk of the runtime consists of two married farmers and the half-lamb, half-human daughter that they raise as though she’s their own. If the dominant trend in early 2010s horror was the appearance of the supernatural, the second half of that decade through the early 2020s have been awash with films where characters must confront their grief and trauma. This one is no exception; the husband and wife are dealing with the loss of their own daughter, Ada, whose name they give their new lamb-child. 

It’s a relatively slow burn until the husband’s brother shows up, per screenwriting rules. A third player, an outsider, inevitably introduces drama, and the brother brings it in spades. Dialogue is sparse but revealing (the husband wishes to go back in time, the wife remarks that his brother has caused trouble before) until some drunken revelry in the third act brings the human drama to a head. The question of the lamb-child and where she came from is eventually answered, but the film abruptly ends soon after. 

Walking out of the theater, my friends and I were split on whether or not we liked it, and this split mostly boiled down to the ending. One common theme: those who wanted more out of this odd concept and felt that the script didn’t ultimately deliver on its premise also didn’t love The VVitch. And so, when I mention Lamb now, and am asked if I’d recommend it, I’ll say, “It depends. What did you think about The VVitch?” If you liked that one, you probably won’t be disappointed by Lamb. If not, hold off for streaming.