Another Win For Midnight Madness
Every year at TIFF there’s one film in the Midnight Madness section that sets the bar for the rest. This isn’t always the winner of the Midnight People’s Choice Award, but it’s always easy to spot as the next big thing. And it’s usually the opening night film; The Substance, Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie, and now River. Originally set to be a Shudder release, it went over so well at its premiere it sparked the first major bidding war of the festival and was picked up for theatrical release by Universal and Blumhouse.
That will prove to be a good get, because River rocks. Powered by two veteran scream queens and crafted with some clever slasher trickery, the film delivers a bevy of violent delights and slasher thrills. I personally hate to use this word to describe horror, as I find it to be vastly overused and misattributed, but River is elevated horror in the best ways one can be. Joshua Giuliano understands that not everything needs to be subverted to be effective. Sometimes you can give the people what they want and still find new ways to send it down the river.
River flows with a current of familiarity amid its inventive, stylish interpretation of the genre, essentially delivering on all of the common tropes we show up for in ways we’ve never seen them presented. Giuliano’s first trick to pulling this off is stacking his cast with two tried-and-true Scream Queens for his leads. Jessica Rothe has made a steady name for herself in horror, and Jane Levy returns to it after nearly a decade away. The second trick is keeping the premise simple and the movie overall lean and mean and brutal. These are slasher staples, and no attempt works without bankable horror stars and a simple plot.
Simple Substance, Inventive Style
The film follows 3 estranged siblings – Lucy (Levy) and Carla (Rothe), sisters who were once close but are now clearly at odds and their younger brother Drew (newcomer Max Mattern) who lives with Lucy in the house they grew up in. The death of their father brings them together to spread his ashes over his favorite river spot. A place where he took his children to fish and swimming and one where each sibling has a different memory of the experiences shared with their dad. The palpable tension between the three is escalated with their boat begins leaking gas and leaves them stranded in the middle of the water.
Of course, no slasher is complete without being stranded somewhere, making for a perfect opportunity to introduce a deranged, faceless killer that appears on the shore. With nowhere to go and a killer set on torturing them one by one, the three must set their differences aside and somehow survive even with nothing and no one to save them. River quickly becomes an intense game of cat and mouse with plenty of twists and ‘WTF!” moments in store as the battle for survival takes everyone to some shocking and terrifying places.
Hear, Don’t See
What Giuliano does to freshen things up and make something old shiny and new is in how he constantly frames familiar beats. There’s a much more straight forward version of River that would ultimately amount to the best thing you see on Shudder but probably forget about in a few days. Instead, Joshua plays with sight and sound with sharp style and slick manipulation (complimentary), building River more like a puzzle to be constructed rather than a fully framed picture. There’s strong sense of hear, don’t see that alters the experience of each scene and ratchets up the frightening tension. You find yourself holding your breath more often because you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next.
What we hear rarely lines up with what we see, and what we see isn’t always the scariest or bloodiest moment. Giuliano understands that there is just as much power in what he chooses NOT to show as there is in splattering the frame with streaks of blood. River injects real terror by flipping some of these visual cues and screams on their head. You never really have the full graps of what’s happening at any given moment, which is by design and keeps you on your toes throughout. As an example, River opens with a typical young couple on a date on the shores the river. Your classic set up for brutal slasher fodder.
We hear everything that happens to them – their quiet set up, the pressure for some sexy time, the killer stalking and eventual murder of the pair. It’s all there except in frame, because the camera only shows us the disarray and aftermath of their demise. We may HEAR the violence, but we only SEE the aftermath; the abandoned picnic blankets, the scattered clothing, the bloody streaks and hand prints on the car. Eventually we see the carnage of the bodies, all while the scene is playing out auditorily. River is hearing the action but only seeing the consequences. It’s seeing the action only a fraction of it, recontextualized when the sounds are revealed in their entirety.
The Cast Is The Final Touch for Success
It’s honestly so cool to see and hear this happen over and over again, letting Giuliano go nuts with unique styling. Throughout its entirety, River never reveals more than it needs to, keeping you completely glued to the screen on the edge of your seat. And don’t fret – there’s plenty of frights and thrills and gnarly killing that we DO get to see, so it’s not all arthouse elevation. There’s a balance that Giuliano finds here between cliches and clever camera trickery, which allows a theme of cyclical violence and trauma to permeate as an undercurrent of richness. The ending hits harder because of this, and watching Levy and Rothe embrace their horror roots is all the more satisfying.
All the inventive tricks in the world wouldn’t work if you didn’t have two leading ladies like Levy and Rothe at the center. They’re just so naturally good at this, and since so much of the threats that befall them is constantly focused on their reactions to things off camera (they see everything before we do and the camera lingers on their increasing terror for way longer than you’d expect) we need them to be believable surrogates of fear for us. They are, and even Mattern pairs well with the women as all three leads have excellent sibling chemistry. And while he doesn’t have any lines, Dane DiLiegro as the gigantic, imposing, terrifying killer aura farms nightmares and is a truly terrifying big bad – with abs.
Final Thoughts
The more I’ve thought about River, the more I like it. There’s an appreciation for what it’s trying to do and the spin on a tired genre never feels pretentious. It’s easy to walk away from River feeling a little let down. Once you strip away the style, the substance can look a little wanting and some ideas left a little half baked. But honestly? That kind of comes with the feature film debut territory, and I for one am willing to overlook some narrative flaws for the sake of a new, fresh voice in horror. Will River be the next Obsession? Probably not. But I think it WILL kick off the horror genre for 2027 and set the bar pretty high for what’s in store.
River is a terrifying, inventive slasher powered by two incredible leads and great use of its abandoned, waterfront setting. It’s brutal and shocking, familiar but new and breathes some new life into the tired slasher genre. It may not be the best of its kind, but for people looking for a spooky night out, River delivers plenty of slasher thrills sure to satisfy genre fans.
And if this is what Giuliano can do in his first time out, then sign me up for River 2: Die Wetter (or something).
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