CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 3-13-26

[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!]

My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, March 13th, 2026.

1) REMINDERS OF HIM

Every once in a while, you sit down in a movie theater, and you’re stunned, not in a good way, not in the “wow, that blew me away” sense, but in that slack-jawed, what-the-hell-did-I-just-watch kind of way.

The kind of stunned where you start looking around the theater like you’re hoping someone else will stand up and say, “This can’t be real, right? This has to be some sort of prank.”

That was my experience watching Reminders of Him, the latest adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel, directed by Vanessa Caswill. And let me tell you something: I was absolutely astounded by just how bad this movie is.

And I don’t mean “bad but entertaining,” or “bad in a cheesy melodramatic way that at least has some camp value.” I mean, incompetent. Inept. Jaw-droppingly misguided.

The kind of movie that feels like it was made by an alien who crash-landed on Earth, decided to make a movie about human beings, and never bothered to observe how humans actually behave.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Because nothing (absolutely nothing) in this movie resembles recognizable human behavior.

The film is based on Hoover’s 2022 novel and tells the story of Kenna Rowan, played by Maika Monroe, who returns to her Wyoming hometown after serving time in prison for a drunk driving accident that killed her boyfriend, Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow).

Kenna gave birth to their daughter, Diem, while she was incarcerated, and the girl is now being raised by Scotty’s parents, Grace and Patrick Landry, played by Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford.

Kenna’s goal is simple: try to rebuild her life, make amends for the past, and somehow reconnect with the daughter she’s never known.

Of course, Scotty’s parents want absolutely nothing to do with her. They blame her for their son’s death, and they’re determined to keep Kenna far away from their granddaughter.

Into this already volatile situation enters Ledger Ward, played by Tyriq Withers, Scotty’s best friend and a former NFL player who now owns a local bar.

Against all logic (and I mean against all logic) Kenna and Ledger begin a secret romantic relationship, which creates an emotional tug-of-war between Ledger’s loyalty to Scotty’s family and his growing feelings for the woman they despise.

On paper, this is the kind of melodramatic redemption story that could work. It’s got guilt, grief, forgiveness, second chances, and complicated relationships. It’s the kind of material that lives or dies on emotional authenticity and believable human interaction. And that is exactly where Reminders of Him completely collapses.

This movie has absolutely no understanding of how people talk, think, move, work, interact, or exist in the real world.

Vanessa Caswill’s direction is so bafflingly inept that the movie feels like a collection of random storytelling gimmicks smashed together with no sense of rhythm or coherence.

The narrative is constantly interrupted by voiceovers (Kenna reading letters she writes in her journal to her dead boyfriend) along with flashbacks, fantasy sequences, shifting points of view, and abrupt cuts that make the whole thing feel like it’s been edited with a chainsaw.

There is no flow to any of it. Scenes begin to build emotional momentum and then, bam, we’re suddenly somewhere else. Conversations are chopped up mid-rhythm. Flashbacks are tossed in without any sense of timing or clarity.

At times, the movie feels edited like an action film, with frantic cutting and no patience for dramatic pacing, which is the exact opposite of what a character-driven drama like this requires.

It’s jarring. Constantly jarring. And when the storytelling itself is this clumsy, you start noticing everything else that’s wrong, like the fact that nobody in this movie behaves like an actual human being.

Take the bar that Ledger supposedly owns and runs. The film treats this place like some sort of vague set piece rather than an actual functioning business. You never really know what the bar serves, how it operates, who works there, or why Ledger seems to spend half his time wandering away from it.

People come and go, employees appear and disappear, and at no point does it resemble a real bar run by real people.

There’s even a scene where Ledger is breaking down cardboard boxes near the dumpster, and I swear to God it looks like Tyriq Withers has never broken down a cardboard box in his entire life. Which sounds like a ridiculous detail to fixate on, but that’s the level this movie drags you down to.

When the storytelling is this incompetent, your brain starts focusing on weird little things, like the fact that this supposedly experienced bar owner clearly has no idea how to flatten a box.

The same thing happens when Kenna gets a job at a grocery store as a bagger. The scenes in the grocery store are so unconvincing, it’s like watching actors perform in a training video written by people who have never actually been inside a grocery store.

Customers don’t know how to place items on the conveyor belt. Cashiers don’t seem to understand how scanning works. Kenna herself bags groceries like she’s never seen a bag before.

Again, it feels like the movie was made by aliens studying human behavior through secondhand rumors.

And then there are the emotional manipulations. Oh boy.

Within the first few minutes of the movie, we get a montage of Kenna struggling to find a job, sad music swelling as she faces rejection after rejection.

She moves into a dingy apartment building populated by stock quirky characters: the loud guitar guy, the weird landlord, the obligatory adorable neighbor with Down syndrome played by Monika Myers, whose character exists almost entirely to deliver saccharine cuteness.

And there are kittens. Lots of kittens.

I’m not exaggerating when I say there are multiple close-up reaction shots of cute kittens within the first ten minutes of the movie. The film is practically begging you to cry through brute-force manipulation.

And then the music kicks in.

Now look, everybody knows how I feel about Coldplay. If you’ve listened to my podcast, my radio show, or read anything I’ve written over the years, you know that I cannot stand Coldplay.

So imagine my delight when the film drops “Yellow” into a big emotional flashback sequence like it’s the most profound needle drop in the history of cinema. I actually laughed out loud in the theater.

Because of course it’s Coldplay. Of course it is. What else would you put into a movie this relentlessly corny?

Performance-wise, the whole thing is a mess. And what makes it worse is that there are genuinely talented people trapped inside it.

Maika Monroe is a terrific actress. She’s built an impressive career in horror films, such as It Follows, The Guest, Watcher, and even the otherwise dreadful Longlegs. She’s one of the best modern scream queens working today. Horror is her wheelhouse. Romantic melodrama like this? Not so much.

She looks bored through most of the film, and honestly, I don’t blame her. She’s been excellent in intense genre work for years, but here she’s stuck delivering dialogue that sounds like it was written by a fourth grader.

In fact, Monroe has starred in a lot of horror movies over the years, but I can honestly say that Reminders of Him might be the scariest one she’s ever been in.

Tyriq Withers fares no better. He’s a very good-looking guy, and the movie makes sure you notice that by having him shirtless whenever possible, but as an actor, he’s stiff and oddly disconnected.

Funny enough, he also starred in Him, the atrocious football horror movie from last year that ended up being the worst film I saw in 2025. Now he’s in Reminders of Him, which means he’s appeared in two of the worst movies I’ve seen recently that both happen to have the word “him” in the title. That’s quite the streak.

Rudy Pankow appears in flashbacks as the deceased boyfriend Scotty, and those scenes are awkwardly staged and bizarrely written, including a moment where Scotty and Ledger get high in a treehouse and mistake a baseball glove for a pigeon. That bizarre pigeon imagery returns later in the movie, like it’s supposed to symbolize Scotty’s lingering spirit or something.

It’s just one more odd storytelling decision in a movie full of them.

And then there’s Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford, two fantastic actors who are completely wasted here. I’ll admit, when Lauren Graham showed up, I perked up immediately.

Anybody who knows me knows how much I love Gilmore Girls. I am a massive Lauren Graham fan. So, I was excited for about thirty seconds.

Then I realized the character she’s playing has absolutely nothing to do. She spends most of the movie looking sad while delivering painfully cliché dialogue.

Whitford fares no better. These are actors with real gravitas and charisma, and they’re reduced to cardboard cutouts meant to provide the illusion of seriousness.

The script itself is nothing but recycled clichés from decades of syrupy romantic melodrama. Redemption arcs, tearful confrontations, symbolic imagery, swelling music cues—it’s all here, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

And none of it works. None of it feels earned. None of it feels real.

What you’re left with is a film that barely qualifies as a movie. It’s a clumsy, manipulative, awkwardly edited pile of melodrama that never once convinces you that these characters are real people experiencing real emotions.

It’s just noise. Sad music, voiceovers, flashbacks, kittens, Coldplay, and bad dialogue thrown together in the vague shape of a story. This thing barely qualifies as a Hallmark Channel movie reject.

We’re barely into March, but I can tell you right now that Reminders of Him is almost certainly going to end up on my list of the worst movies of 2026.

It is, without question, one of the most ineptly made films I’ve seen in years. A terrible, terrible, unwatchable movie. - 1/2 star

2) UNDERTONE

There are few things more frustrating than a movie that starts out strong, pulls you in with a terrific setup, creates a mood, builds tension… and then completely collapses in the final stretch.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happens with undertone, the feature debut from Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason. For about the first 45 minutes (maybe even an hour) you think you’re watching a really smart, atmospheric horror film that understands how to use sound, character, and isolation to get under your skin.

And then the whole thing just nose-dives into silliness and loud nonsense.

The film centers on Evy, played by Nina Kiri, who is absolutely terrific here. She carries the entire movie on her shoulders. Evy is a skeptical co-host of a paranormal podcast called The Undertone, which she records with her partner Justin, voiced by Adam DiMarco.

When the story begins, Evy has moved back into her childhood home to care for her dying mother, a devoutly religious woman who lies silently upstairs as Evy tries to keep her life together downstairs.

The house is filled with religious iconography (crucifixes, images of the Virgin Mary, prayers, hymns), remnants of the rigid upbringing Evy had as a child.

While continuing the podcast from the dining room table (something I personally found a little eerie since I’ve recorded plenty of podcasts from a dining room table myself), Evy and Justin receive a mysterious set of ten audio recordings from a married couple expecting a baby.

The recordings contain strange noises, unsettling whispers, and increasingly disturbing events that the couple claims are happening inside their home.

The gimmick here (and it’s a good one) is that much of the horror is conveyed through sound. Instead of found footage, it’s essentially “found audio.” Evy listens to the recordings through her headphones while we hear what she hears, and the film uses sound design as the primary tool for building dread.

Early on, it works really well. The creaks of the house, the unsettling sounds in the recordings, the isolation of Evy sitting alone at night analyzing these files... It’s genuinely creepy.

And the setup gets even more complicated. Evy discovers she’s pregnant. She’s dealing with the stress of caring for a dying parent. She’s relapsing into drinking after a period of sobriety.

The house itself is filled with religious reminders of her childhood. All of these elements (grief, trauma, motherhood, faith, addiction) are introduced in a way that suggests the movie might actually be digging into something meaningful.

For a while, undertone handles this material surprisingly well. The scenes of Evy caring for her dying mother feel authentic and painful. Anyone who has gone through that experience (watching a parent decline while putting their own life on hold) will recognize how real those moments feel.

The film also builds an effective sense of isolation by never leaving the house. Evy and her mother are the only characters we actually see on screen. Everyone else exists only as voices, which reinforces the claustrophobic atmosphere.

But then the mythology kicks in.

The recordings are eventually linked to a demon associated with infant mortality and miscarriages, tied into nursery rhymes, religious superstition, and hidden meanings in childhood lullabies. On paper, that might sound intriguing. In practice, it’s where the movie begins to unravel.

The carefully built atmosphere starts to get replaced by louder and louder audio jump scares. The logic of the story begins to fall apart.

Suddenly, Evy is wandering around the house with headphones on while supposedly still recording the podcast, even though earlier the movie clearly established that she records through a microphone setup at the table. Technical rules that the movie set up earlier get thrown out the window.

And as the last 20 minutes roll in, the movie turns into exactly the kind of chaotic sensory overload that it had been smart enough to avoid earlier. Instead of tension, we get noise. Instead of dread, we get audio jump scares. Instead of psychological horror, we get demon nonsense.

What’s especially frustrating is that the film had already established real emotional stakes. Evy’s alcoholism, her traumatic childhood, her resentment and guilt toward her dying mother, her unexpected pregnancy, these are all serious themes that the movie initially treats with respect.

But the ending abandons all of that in favor of supernatural chaos that completely undercuts the character drama.

There’s also a subtext in the film that I found pretty uncomfortable, whether intentional or not. The story increasingly frames Evy’s pregnancy (and her uncertainty about it) as something she’s being punished for. The demon mythology tied to miscarriages and infant death starts to feel suspiciously like a moral judgment on her for considering an abortion.

Combine that with the heavy religious imagery and the idea that she’s somehow being punished for rejecting her mother’s beliefs, and the movie starts to lean into a weird pro-Christian, anti-abortion subtext that I found deeply unpleasant.

Now, maybe some viewers won’t read it that way. But it’s there, and once it becomes apparent, it’s hard to ignore.

It’s especially disappointing because undertone really does have things going for it. Nina Kiri is outstanding. She grounds the entire film with a performance that stays believable even when the movie around her starts getting ridiculous.

The sound design early on is effective. The premise of horror conveyed through audio recordings is genuinely clever. And the first half of the film builds a strong, unsettling mood.

But once the demon plot takes over and the movie abandons its emotional core, it just becomes loud, silly, and ultimately not very scary.

And that’s the tragedy of undertone. It’s a movie that starts out really strong, with a smart idea and a terrific lead performance, and then completely falls apart by the end.

It’s not Nina Kiri’s fault. She’s terrific. But the script and the final act simply don’t hold together.

So while the first half of undertone shows real promise, the last 20 minutes derail the entire thing. And in the end, that makes it impossible for me to recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️

3) ANDRE IS AN IDIOT

There aren’t many documentaries like André Is an Idiot. And I mean that as a genuine compliment.

This is one of the most unique, entertaining, strange, and unexpectedly powerful documentaries I’ve seen in a long time. It’s funny, wildly imaginative, occasionally overwhelming, deeply moving, and it might actually do something that a lot of movies hope to do but rarely accomplish: it might save some lives.

The film is directed by Tony Benna and centers on André Ricciardi, a San Francisco advertising executive who discovers (too late) that skipping a routine colonoscopy was a very bad decision.

At 52, after delaying the test he’d been advised to take years earlier, André is diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer that has already spread. The prognosis is terminal. Instead of retreating quietly into illness, André does something unusual. He decides to turn the last chapter of his life into a creative project.

And that project becomes this movie.

Ricciardi was a creative guy. His ad agency helped create those famous claymation Ozzy Osbourne Lipton Brisk tea commercials, and that same sense of chaotic imagination runs through the entire film.

What could have been a very somber documentary about terminal illness instead becomes this wild, frenetic, almost punk-rock piece of filmmaking that jumps between interviews, surreal animation, personal confessions, philosophical musings, and brutally honest footage of what it actually looks like when someone goes through cancer treatment.

The movie covers the final stretch of André’s life (about three years after the diagnosis) and it does so with a kind of irreverent humor that feels almost shocking at first. André himself calls himself an idiot because he knows exactly what happened. He ignored the screening. He delayed the colonoscopy. And that decision changed everything.

But the tone here is never self-pitying. If anything, it’s the opposite. André is a terrific storyteller, and the film leans heavily into that. When chemotherapy causes his hair to fall out, he jokes about the little clumps of hair like they’re creatures that have come to live with him.

And then (because this movie has that kind of imagination) we actually see those hairballs turn into little animated characters with googly eyes and sneakers running around the screen.

That kind of playful insanity runs throughout the film. There’s stop-motion animation, strange visual metaphors, crazy editing rhythms, color shifts, sound collages, it’s almost like watching a fever dream documentary.

At times, it reminded me of the anything-goes experimental storytelling style of someone like Ross McElwee or the playful visual chaos of a Michel Gondry project, but filtered through the mind of a dying ad man who refuses to stop being creative.

The result is something that’s constantly surprising. One moment, André is talking about the philosophy of death and what it means to leave something behind. The next moment, he’s joking about finding “divots” in his increasingly thin body where he can store Skittles. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

The movie also spends a lot of time with the people around him. His wife, Janice, is interviewed, as are their teenage daughters, his brother, and close friends. One of the most fascinating aspects of the documentary is hearing about André and Janice’s unusual relationship.

Their marriage actually began as a kind of practical arrangement (almost like a green-card marriage) but eventually turned into something very real and deeply loving. Their history together includes winning The Newlywed Game, which the film gleefully revisits.

And as André’s health declines, you see how those relationships change. You see the fear, the frustration, the tenderness. Watching his daughters talk about what their father’s illness means to them is incredibly moving.

At the same time, the film never shies away from the harsh realities of cancer treatment. Anyone who has gone through it (or has helped a loved one go through it) will recognize the chaos of medications, the side effects of chemotherapy, the endless appointments, the emotional whiplash of hope and despair. There are moments here that are brutally honest and painfully real.

But they’re also often funny. André has this gallows humor about everything, including the absurd logistics of organizing all the pills he has to take. At one point, he casually admits that sometimes he just decides to skip them because the routine is so ridiculous.

Stylistically, the movie is incredibly ambitious. It’s bursting with ideas. The animation, the editing, the sound design, the tonal shifts...it's a lot. And occasionally it might be a little too much.

There are moments where the sensory overload becomes slightly overwhelming, where the jump between live action, animation, interviews, and surreal visual metaphors can feel jarring.

That’s probably the only real criticism I have. The movie’s energy is so relentless that it occasionally becomes chaotic in ways that distract from the emotional core.

But even that chaos feels appropriate for the subject. André himself was clearly a whirlwind of a personality, and the movie reflects that.

And ultimately, the film has a message. A very clear one.

At the very end of the movie, after everything we’ve watched (the humor, the creativity, the physical decline, the final moments), the film closes with a blunt title card that reads: “Get your fucking colonoscopy.”

And honestly, that’s the point.

Men, especially, are notorious for ignoring their health. We skip doctor visits. We assume everything will be fine. We delay screenings because they’re uncomfortable or inconvenient. André Ricciardi did exactly that, and the result was catastrophic.

This documentary turns that mistake into a warning.

And it does so in a way that is deeply personal, wildly entertaining, visually inventive, and emotionally powerful. By the time it’s over, you feel like you’ve spent 90 minutes getting to know a guy you never would have met otherwise.

You see his humor, his creativity, his flaws, his family, and his courage in the face of something unimaginably difficult.

André might call himself an idiot. But the truth is, he comes across as a thoughtful, funny, generous human being whose final creative act might help other people avoid making the same mistake.

André Is an Idiot is one of the most original documentaries I’ve seen in years. It’s strange, moving, hilarious, occasionally overwhelming, and ultimately very important.

I totally recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

4) SLANTED

There’s an interesting idea at the center of Slanted, and for about a third of the movie, you can see a pretty sharp satire trying to claw its way out.

Unfortunately, the movie eventually buries that idea under a pile of goopy body-horror gags and tonal confusion, and what could have been something genuinely biting ends up feeling like a missed opportunity.

Slanted is the feature debut of writer-director Amy Wang, and the premise alone is enough to grab your attention. Shirley Chen plays Joan Huang, a Chinese-American high school senior who feels like an outsider in her suburban school, a place where the prom queens are always blonde, always white, and always part of the same popular clique.

Joan becomes convinced that the only way she’ll ever belong is to literally become someone else. So she undergoes an experimental procedure offered by a mysterious company called Ethnos, which is an “ethnic modification surgery” that transforms her into a white girl, played after the operation by Mckenna Grace.

That setup alone suggests a wild mix of satire, social commentary, and body horror. Imagine throwing The Substance and Mean Girls into a blender, adding a dash of Get Out, and maybe even a tiny spoonful of something like the Wayans Brothers’ White Chicks.

It sounds like a strange recipe, and in theory, it could have produced something sharp, funny, and genuinely uncomfortable in a good way. Instead, it’s a mess.

The early parts of the movie actually show promise. The satire about assimilation and the desperation to fit into rigid beauty standards works for a while. Joan’s discomfort with her identity, her embarrassment around her parents, her obsession with prom queen culture, those are all interesting starting points.

Once she becomes Jo Hunt, the new white version of herself, there are some effective scenes showing how differently she’s treated. Her family barely recognizes her. At school, doors suddenly open. The popular girls embrace her. The social hierarchy shifts instantly.

Those moments work because they’re rooted in recognizable truth.

And the cast helps. Mckenna Grace, who seems to be in everything lately (and who first made a big impression on audiences in the recent Ghostbusters movies) is a very good young actress.

She’s sharp, she’s confident, and she brings energy to the role. Shirley Chen is also quite good as Joan before the transformation.

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and the rest of the supporting cast are likable, and there are performances here that keep the movie watchable even when the script starts to wobble.

The strongest character in the movie, though, is Joan’s father (Fang Du). He works as a janitor at the school and also cleans houses in the community, and his reactions to what his daughter has done (emotionally, culturally, and personally) are easily the most compelling parts of the film.

Those moments actually start to dig into the complicated issues the movie seems interested in: identity, assimilation, race, and the painful cost of trying to erase who you are. But then the movie veers off the road.

Once the body-horror elements really kick in (when Joan’s new “white” skin starts failing and her original face begins re-emerging), the film abandons its satire in favor of gross-out gags.

Instead of pushing deeper into the themes it set up, it leans heavily into exaggerated, sloppy body horror. Skin peels, faces melt, and the movie becomes less about identity and more about shock-value jokes.

And the problem is that Amy Wang doesn’t really seem to know how to handle the body-horror side of the story.

Great body horror (think David Cronenberg, for example) uses physical transformation as a metaphor for deeper anxieties about identity, culture, or society. Here, the transformations feel mostly like punchlines.

Ironically, the movie reminded me of the recent film The Substance, which also tried to mix satire with grotesque transformation and didn’t quite pull it off. If that’s one of the inspirations here, it’s not the best one to follow.

Even stranger, the film sometimes starts to resemble the old body-switch comedies that were everywhere in the ’80s and early ’90s, you know, movies like Freaky Friday, Big, 18 Again, 13 Going on 30.

Those films played with identity and transformation, too, but they were built as light comedy fantasies. When Slanted drifts into that territory, it starts to feel like a weird hybrid: part social satire, part body-horror gross-out, part old-school body-switch comedy.

And none of those pieces ever fully come together.

To be fair, I do admire some of the risks the movie takes. There are moments here that are pretty outrageous and genuinely surprising. The film occasionally pushes into uncomfortable territory in ways that might offend some audiences, and I respect that willingness to go there.

There’s a boldness in the premise and in certain scenes that suggests a filmmaker who’s not afraid to poke at sensitive subjects. But boldness isn’t the same thing as follow-through.

In the end, Slanted never delivers on the interesting questions it raises. It sets up a sharp satire about race, beauty standards, and assimilation, and then abandons those ideas for messy body-horror antics that feel more like cheap shock than meaningful commentary.

It’s not without its moments. The cast is good, especially Mckenna Grace and Fang Du. There are scenes that hint at a much smarter movie. And I did find myself surprised a couple of times by how far the film was willing to push certain jokes.

But when all is said and done, Slanted feels like a derivative mash-up of other, better movies. It’s not as clever as Mean Girls, not as effective as real body horror, and it never quite figures out what kind of film it wants to be.

That’s why, despite the ambition and the occasional bold moment, I can’t recommend it.

It’s a risky idea that deserved a sharper movie. Instead, it ends up feeling like a strange throwback to those old body-switch comedies from the ’80s, only messier and far less satisfying. - ⭐️⭐️

5) THE GATES

Every once in a while, you see a movie that has a premise so loaded with possibility that you start imagining how great it could be before the story even really gets going.

You can feel the potential sitting there right on the surface. You think about the kind of movie it might become if the filmmakers really leaned into the darker edges of the idea. And unfortunately, that’s exactly the experience of watching The Gates.

This is a movie with a setup that could have been a terrific throwback to the edgy exploitation thrillers of the 1970s.

It could have been confrontational, dangerous, funny in a dark way, politically sharp, and genuinely exciting. Instead, it ends up feeling oddly neutered and toothless, like a movie that keeps hinting at something bold but never actually has the courage to go there.

The story centers on three African American college friends, Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), who are driving through Texas on their way to a party.

In a decision that has spelled doom in movies for decades, they take a shortcut off the highway to avoid traffic. And as we all know from about fifty years of genre cinema, taking the back road is almost always a terrible idea.

Their shortcut leads them through the gates of an isolated, wealthy community populated mostly by white residents. And while driving through, they witness something they absolutely were not supposed to see: a well-respected local pastor named Jacob, played by James Van Der Beek, murdering a woman inside one of the homes.

Once Jacob realizes they saw the crime, the situation escalates quickly. The community is essentially locked down, and the three friends suddenly find themselves trapped inside this gated neighborhood where nearly everyone is armed, suspicious, and very aware that three strangers (three Black strangers) are wandering around where they clearly don’t belong.

Jacob uses his influence and charisma to frame them for the murder, and the night becomes a desperate scramble for survival as the three friends try to escape while avoiding the increasingly paranoid residents.

Now, on paper, that premise is rich with possibilities. The idea of three Black college students accidentally wandering into a wealthy, heavily armed, predominantly white gated community in Texas is a setup that practically begs to explore racial tension, paranoia, and the ugly realities that can exist beneath the polished surface of suburban life.

And the film does gesture toward those ideas.

Early on, the characters are pulled over by a police officer for no clear reason other than the fact that they’re three Black guys driving a very nice car.

The scene introduces the theme of racial profiling and sets up some tension between the characters: Derek trying to remain calm and diplomatic, Kevin openly frustrated with the reality of racism, and Tyon mainly focused on protecting his future as a college football player.

The dynamic between the three friends is actually pretty well established. You’ve got the idealist, the skeptic, and the guy just trying to keep his head down and not ruin his chances at a career. That part of the movie works.

The problem is that once they enter the gated community, the film never really commits to the ideas it introduces.

The racism is implied throughout the movie, but it’s rarely confronted directly. The residents are suspicious, hostile, and armed, but the film never allows that hostility to become truly ugly or terrifying. Instead of diving into the social tension that the premise practically demands, writer-director John Burr keeps everything strangely safe.

Which is frustrating, because the setup is perfect for something much more provocative.

If this movie had been made in the 1970s during the height of exploitation cinema, it would have gone all the way.

Those movies didn’t shy away from uncomfortable realities. Films like Fight for Your Life, The Landlord, or Redneck County Rape confronted racial hatred head-on and used genre storytelling to expose it in raw, confrontational ways.

The Gates hints at that territory but never steps fully into it.

Instead, the film gradually becomes a fairly standard straight-to-video thriller about three guys stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Along the way, the characters split up and encounter various residents in the community.

There’s Christopher, a former Dallas Cowboys player who initially seems sympathetic before pulling a gun on them.

There’s a bizarre party scene where Kevin stumbles into a recording studio full of suburban white guys who are obsessed with hip-hop culture, leading to a surprisingly funny moment where they all record a rap track together.

That scene is actually one of the most amusing in the movie, mostly because it temporarily relieves the tension and allows the actors to show a little personality.

But the main conflict keeps circling back to Jacob, the manipulative pastor played by James Van Der Beek. He’s essentially trying to build a cult-like religious empire inside this gated community, and at one point, he even shows Derek a miniature model of the massive church complex he plans to construct in the center of the neighborhood.

It’s the kind of villain speech that exists mainly to explain the plot.

Van Der Beek clearly seems to be enjoying himself playing the bad guy. Anyone who remembers his terrifying performance in The Rules of Attraction knows he can do villainy very well. And there are moments here where you can see him leaning into the role and having fun with it. But the script never gives him enough to really chew on.

Which is a shame, because this film also carries an unintended weight: it ended up being Van Der Beek’s final film performance before his death earlier this year. The closing credits dedicate the film to him, and it would have been nice if his last role had been something more memorable than this.

That’s really the story of The Gates in general.

There are talented actors here. Mason Gooding is a solid performer and has already proven himself in genre films like Heart Eyes. The three leads have decent chemistry, and there are flashes of humor and tension that suggest the movie could have been much sharper.

But every time the story seems ready to push into something darker, more dangerous, more confrontational, it pulls back.

What could have been a bold exploitation thriller about racism, paranoia, and mob mentality becomes a fairly generic survival story that ends with the inevitable shootout and bloodbath that the opening scene promises.

The movie actually begins with Derek covered in blood, holding a gun, before cutting to a title card reading “Eight Hours Earlier,” so we know from the start that things are going to end badly.

The journey getting there just isn’t nearly as exciting or as daring as it should have been. And that’s the real disappointment.

Because the premise of The Gates is loaded with potential. It could have been edgy. It could have been confrontational. It could have been a modern throwback to the kind of gritty exploitation thrillers that actually had something to say.

Instead, it settles for being a fairly routine thriller that never fully embraces the provocative ideas sitting right in front of it.

A missed opportunity. And unfortunately, not a very memorable one. - ⭐️⭐️

Thanks for reading, and please SUBSCRIBE to my weekly NEWSLETTER!