In Backrooms, memory becomes a labyrinth of guilt, resentment, and self-deception.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have spent a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror at the good and the bad of my life. Thankfully, wise people have reminded me that you cannot live your life staring backward. At some point, you have to look forward. That is the real struggle in Backrooms: what happens when the past becomes the place you would rather stay even when it seems like a nightmare?

Movie Verdict: Love it!

SPOILERS REVIEW

While it is most certainly a horror movie, Backrooms is also interested in what and where people hide from themselves rather than what scares them or us, for that matter.

Directed by Kane Parsons, it’s a tense mix of traditional third-person and ‘hidden footage’ style camera work that bounces from ‘real life’ to a memory palace that is a bleak, old, abandoned office space. Confusion is magnified by wandering through one unsettling, endless labyrinth of hallways, rooms, pools, and impossible spaces. It’s a chilling horror movie.

After a quick, first-person, found-footage, terrifying opening scene, Backrooms follows Clark (Ejiofor), a struggling furniture store owner whose life borders on pathetic. We meet Clark as he is shooting a pretty pathetic knockoff commercial for his business. Later in therapy, we learn his life has fallen apart. We learn he drinks too much. He has rage issues. He is an underachiever. An architect by training, he is selling particleboard crap in an enormous, underfilled warehouse. The cherry on the mud-pie of his life, his wife kicked him out.

The scenes between Ejiofor and Reinsve are riveting. Mary (Reinsve) is working with Clark to gain perspective, release his anger and resentment to improve his life. She is not achieving her objective. There is a power scene in which she role-plays as his wife, and it’s quite terrifying. We see what Clark has brewing just under the surface.

When a strange doorway appears in the basement of his furniture showroom, he discovers the backrooms, an endless, disorienting space of rooms, hallways, and passages. At first, the place terrifies him, but the more time he spends there, the more attached he becomes.

Clark eventually tells his therapist, Mary, about what he has found. She is skeptical at first, but she gets pulled into the mystery as the Backrooms reveal themselves to be not only a physical place but a space connected to memory, guilt, resentment, and the parts of our mind.

A lot of people are talking about Backrooms because of the numbers. Made for a reported $10 million, the film crossed $100 million worldwide in its opening weekend and has already earned more than $210 million globally. Those are remarkable numbers, but they didn’t surprise me. My production company, Killer Shot Films, was founded on a simple belief: give audiences a good horror movie and they will show up.

So when I bought my ticket, a week after it opened, I wasn’t interested in the box office story. I wanted to know if the movie itself was any good. Having never watched the original YouTube videos, I went in cold and was surprised to find a much more ambitious film than I expected. Inspired by Kane Parsons’ viral series and written by Roberto Patino, Backrooms becomes a complicated story about memory, guilt, resentment, and the ways we disappear into our own minds to escape reality. It also asks what happens if a therapist follows after them, trying to save them. I think!

I say that because Backrooms can be interpreted a dozen different ways. An alternate dimension. A subconscious landscape. A graveyard for places and people that have been lost to time. Or memory. Our forgotten fantasies. The film never forces a single answer.

What interested me most was that these ‘backrooms’ are built from memory itself.

Throughout the film, there is a recurring discussion about neurological pathways, the mental shortcuts people create to navigate everyday life. Those pathways help us function, but they can also trap us in patterns. We repeat the same stories, the same mistakes, and the same grievances until they become part of our identity.

No character embodies that more than Clark.

Chiwetel Ejiofor gives the film’s strongest performance as a man who has become stuck in his past. I would call him an alcoholic who blames others for the state of his life and remains fixated on a past he cannot change. Clark is angry, resentful, embarrassed by his life, and invested in the idea that everyone else is responsible for where he ended up. What makes Clark fascinating is that he doesn’t simply get lost in the Backrooms. He wants to stay.

I think Clark gets comfortable there because he is already living in the past. And the longer he is there, the more he wanders and uncovers, the more rooms are scattered with distorted remnants of memories and equally twisted and distorted people…including Clark himself.

Clark is not simply sad or lost. He is rageful, both explosive and simmering, and it’s a constant undercurrent. It shows up at work and a few times during therapy. But in the “backroom”, his shadow self manifests as his monster. It’s his lower self. An enormous, monstrous version of him, the movie has turned his inner life into something out of a night terror. It feels like the part of Clark that has been growing in the dark, fed by blame, drinking, denial, and the stories he keeps telling himself.

The rage matters because by the time Clark comes face to face with himself, it’s a creature. A huge puppet, quite scary “cover your eyes” version of Clark. But by the time Mary meets him, Clark has gotten used to being in “the backroom” and believes he is better off there, trying to live with his ‘rage creature.’

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance is unsettling and powerful.

I also could not ignore the casting. Clark could have been played by anyone, but he is played by a Black man, and that changes the meaning behind the anger of the character for me. He is angry, volatile, resentful, and eventually frightening to the people around him. Some of that is the point of the story, but it also brushes up against the old “angry Black man” trope in a way I am not sure the film fully examines. Watching Clark spiral, especially in scenes where his rage is directed toward a white woman, made me wonder what the movie understood about that image and what it simply used for tension.

Mary’s journey is different. She is not trying to disappear into memory. She is trying to get free from it. Free from her mother’s mental illness and abuse and her powerlessness over it all. It’s an effective counterpoint.

Where Clark is trapped by resentment, Mary is trapped by guilt. She is a therapist who claims to have answers, but also knows she can help no one.

Both characters are haunted by the past, but in very different ways. One refuses to take responsibility for it. The other struggles to forgive herself for it. Their journeys through the Backrooms become reflections of those opposing emotional states.

I also appreciated the film’s restraint. Parsons leaves significant questions unanswered. The Backrooms remain mysterious. Their rules remain uncertain. The film trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than explaining every detail.

I left Backrooms thinking less about the maze or the monster. I was more self-reflective of my relationship with memories. I understood how they can be comforting. It can be nostalgic. It can even feel safer than the present. But here it’s shown as a place of self-deception where you can get lost with monsters of your own making.

The movie “Backrooms” is frightening for classic reasons: jump scares, found footage, small spaces, running, being chased, what’s around that corner, and who or what’s over there! I’m not going to lie; I covered my eyes more than once. But what is more frightening and equally interesting to me is the idea of being trapped by your desire to stay in the past.

The movie also leaves room for these backrooms to be more than a psychological space.

There are scientists and researchers orbiting the story, people connected to an institute that seems to have stumbled into something they cannot fully understand. I liked that layer because it keeps the film from becoming too neat.

Maybe the Backrooms are memory. Maybe they are the subconscious. Maybe they are an alternate dimension that someone found by accident and then tried to study. The movie is smart enough not to force one answer.

- Victoria Bert \ @victoriabnyc

SOME SPOILERS

There are movies about revenge, movies about road trips… buddy movies, and sister movies… movies about rage, and then there is… Is God Is … which is unapologetically about all of them!

The director, Aleshea Harris, is not interested in clean morality. Her film is not interested in making violence comfortable. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you uncomfortable, emotional, and thinking about how it makes you feel long after you leave the theater.

It forced me to focus my own fury on abusers, bullies, and even their enablers who tolerate, protect, or love them. It compelled me to look at physical abuse unflinchingly by digging into inherited trauma, survival, and what happens when people who have been brutalized stop asking permission to retaliate.

The film, which is based on her 2018 play of the same name, follows twin sisters Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, who were permanently and horribly scarred after their abusive father set their mother and them on fire when they were children.

The movie opens with a brutal and beautifully desaturated scene from their childhood: two little girls in pale dresses sitting together on a bench in a field. Their backs are to us. So we can’t see why another child calls one of them ugly. But they do. Unfortunately for them. This is the first f*%k-around-and-find-out moment. One sister picks up a bat and swings off camera. We only hear the crack from the attack. When she comes back into frame, she wraps her arm around her sister protectively. Blood, the only color in the black and white scene, smears across the white dress.

The image tells us everything about this movie's themes.

Love. Protection. Rage. Violence. Trauma.

What we will learn later is that those kids called Anaia ugly because she has horrible facial scars from a burn all over her face. What we learned just then is that Racine will always step up when someone insults her sister.

The movie is a revenge thriller. It’s a fever dream. It’s a nightmare.

Harris is an artful first-time film director. It’s creative, brave, and even fun. This helps balance out the savagery.

For me, the movie works because the sisters work.

Anaia is the quieter, more emotionally observant sister, carrying deep emotional and physical scars. She carries the more visible burns across her face, neck, and back…and maybe that’s why she is more introspective. She is also more observant, more emotional, and more hesitant.

Racine, who also carries visible scars from the fire, is more reactive, aggressive, and fiercely protective of her sister. Her burns are less noticeable on her arms and hands. She is more impulsive, more reactive, more willing to go wherever the rage takes them.

They move through this world like sisters from Greek mythology.

It’s established quickly that the sisters react differently in most situations and are treated differently by everyone. Their relationship feels codependent, comical, intuitive, and deeply lived in. Many times, they barely need words. And several times, scenes are played out only with their eyes; only the subtitles tell us what they are saying to each other with their glances. For many of those moments, we didn’t even need the subtitles!

The performances from Young and Johnson are extraordinary. Never cliche and very powerful. Another brilliant bit of direction from Harris, she balances their sadness, resentments, and mercurial personalities perfectly.

The movie reintroduces us to the twins as adults, working together as cleaning ladies. They are again put in a situation where, when faced with someone recoiling from Anaia’s burns, Racine goes into bear mode! So they lose their jobs.

Days later, the twins receive a letter from their bedridden, dying mother, Ruby, played perfectly by Vivica A. Fox.

She is bedridden and disfigured with burns.

I won’t spoil one moment of these scenes when they are reunited with their mother. It was unbelievable. It’s captivating.

Let’s just boil it down to the point… after she tells them what their daddy did, what happened to them as babies many years ago, and shows them (and thankfully not us) how severe her full-body 3-degree burns were…She gives them one instruction:

“Make yo daddy dead. Dead. Dead.”

I literally almost said out loud in the theater, OK. Let’s go!

Like me, Racine is ready-ta-go almost immediately. Anaia hesitates. This is where we learn about the title. They will do it because their mom created them…she is God. So god has told them to kill their daddy! Again… I say, let’s go! And they do.

I wasn’t mad at it.

So, now, the revenge road trip begins.

They drive, rap, dance, and smoke their way around in a fluffy steering-wheeled 1990s Sedan. This car is its own character: rattling, beat-up, and barely being held together by bungee cords. It’s a vibe! It tells us exactly who these women are: broken, funny, and rattling with powerful personalities.

On the hunt, their first stop is a former girlfriend of their father, the one he took up with after burning up his children and their mother.

The movie then introduces us to a string of bizarre, hyper-specific, victimized, sad, and deeply dangerous characters.

Miss Divine’s if first. The ex-girlfriend. Her house is a church. She is a preacher. Miss Divine dresses in white, casts out demons, holds service in her living room, and carries herself like a Pentecostal prophet and con artist. The second she sees the sisters, you wonder if she knows who they are.

Inside her house, there is a shrine dedicated to their abusive father. He left her…but she is waiting for him to come back. The altar is filled with his old stuff. Deodorant. Candy. A shirt. Address book. Random objects are saved like holy relics.

She tells the girls she took him in as a broken cow and raised him into a bull. She also has his son, an intense young man who lives up to his stare. She tells them she has been waiting for him to come back…since before Jr. was born. Woah.

From the preachers’ house, they next find his attorney. The one who represented him at his trial. The man who helped their father walk free is a Better Call Saul kind of shister lawyer. Now, he lives in fear of their father too. He hires a dominatrix to beat him because he is convinced that one day the father will return and finish what he started. Years earlier, after helping the father avoid punishment, the lawyer made the mistake of expressing disgust and saying the father might return to hurt the mother and children again. For that, the father cut out his tongue.

It borders on the ridiculous and, at the same time, is unnerving. He communicates with the sisters through a little whiteboard. They extract information from him by using a rock in a sock, which is both funny and horrifying at the exact same time.

Eventually, the twins make their way toward the father’s new life: a beautiful home, a beautiful wife, twin sons, wealth, comfort, what looks like weird and disturbing normalcy. It is shocking after everything we know and have seen.

Now, the movie becomes terrifying in a completely different way. There were moments when I put my hands up to my eyes!

His sons, who grew up affluent and are plugged tightly. His wife has PTSD from living in what is clearly an abusive household. There are scenes here that I won’t spoil, either.

I will just say that when the father, played by Sterling K. Brown, finally comes home and discovers revenge has come knocking on his door, he is terrifying.

He does not scream.

He calmly takes off his shoes.

He makes himself a sandwich.

Meanwhile, Racine is dragging Anaia across the floor, trying to hide her under the dining room table. Bruh!

It is chilling.

Not because he explodes, but because he doesn’t.

The calmness is the horror.

Brown plays him with a menace, the kind of manipulation that feels painfully recognizable. He speaks softly. Rationally. Like a man who has had years to perfect the art of abuse. He reframes the fire story, claiming their mother dragged them into the bathroom, into the flames herself. Even as I knew he was lying, I caught myself considering it for a split second.

That is how manipulation works.

That is how abusers work.

And then, once Anaia lowers her defenses, her weapon, and lets herself believe him for even a second, he slaps her hard across the face.

That moment hit me hard because it explained everything about him.

And maybe that is why the movie sat so heavily on me.

Because underneath this stylized story of violence is a story about what prolonged abuse does to people. About children burned physically, emotionally, spiritually, and then abandoned to systems that probably harmed them even more.

There is an old saying: hurt dogs bite.

These girls bite.

And I realized, while watching this movie, that I did not feel sympathy for anyone on the receiving end of their rage.

That reaction surprised me a little, but it also told me something truthful about where I am emotionally right now as a Black woman living in this particular moment.

There was something in this film that connected deeply to a rage I’m feeling. A feeling that, for years, as a Black woman, we have been told to absorb different kinds of violence, disrespect, dismissal, betrayal, manipulation, exploitation, and silence gracefully. Smile through it. Survive it quietly. Be strong. Persevere with grace.

This movie says absolutely not. It says get mad.

It allows these women to retaliate. To become wrathful. To stop being polite containers for pain.

And I think that is why the movie affected me so deeply.

It’s saying something tragic and triumphant. Racine and Anaia are consumed by rage, but what is the cost of revenge, and is it worth it?

Sometimes it is.

This film is savage, emotional, funny, upsetting, theatrical, cinematic, and deeply committed to its vision. It is the kind of film that makes you squirm in your seat while also forcing you to confront your own relationship to justice, vengeance, empathy, and rage.

Finally, this movie is beautifully crafted.

I absolutely loved it.

Not because it made me feel good, but because it understood something ugly and honest about anger. The kind born from abuse. The kind born from being unheard for too long. The kind that stops asking permission to exist and just...is!

- Victoria Bert \ @victoriabnyc

Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Joshua Boone bring warmth, wit, strength, and spiritual weight to Debbie Allen’s powerful revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

I love live theater. I love Broadway. I love dramas. I love musicals. I love the avant-garde. I love the classics. I love old-fashioned theater. I love the strange stuff, the big stuff, the quiet stuff, and the plays that simply trust actors, language, and light.

There is something magical about a theater space being transformed into a playwright’s ideas, a director’s vision, and the living, breathing talent of actors. When it works, there is nothing like it. The moment is singular. The energy is palpable. Even when something goes wrong, it’s magic. You cannot capture live theater in the same way again.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a beautifully acted, deeply human revival of an August Wilson play that still speaks with force.

It is funny. It is warm. It is haunting. It is spiritual. It is grounded. It is full of people who feel like people.

I’ve seen many Broadway shows. My first was A Chorus Line in 1975, when I was a very young girl. My second was Dreamgirls with Jennifer Holliday in 1981, so the bar has always been high. Since then, I’ve seen countless shows on Broadway and Off-Broadway. Every season I see dozens of productions, and often I’ll see a show more than once because I know that exact performance will never exist again.

My highest count is five times for Jamie Lloyd’s reimagining of Sunset Boulevard, starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis. That production completely reshaped how we experience the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Close behind is the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, during Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster’s run, which I saw four times.

When theater is good, it is very, very good. I cannot get enough of it.

When it is bad, it is torture. I have only walked out of maybe two shows in my life. One was Julie Taymor’s The Green Bird. I left at intermission because I remember thinking, I will never get that time back again. I cannot remember the other show, but I remember leaving. I must have blocked it out. And even when something does not resonate with me emotionally, I still appreciate the hard work. Theater takes craft. It takes labor. It takes people giving themselves over to a world that only exists for those few hours.

All that being said, while I was sitting in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I thought to myself: when can I see this show again?

Other Critics Are Calling It…

Critics have been responding strongly to this Broadway revival, especially the direction by Debbie Allen, the cast, and the power of August Wilson’s writing.

Deadline called the production “a full-on reminder of Wilson’s singular genius,” praising the way the play blends naturalism with memory, spirituality, history, and the lingering presence of the past. The review also singled out the “no-weak-link cast,” including Taraji P. Henson in her Broadway debut, Cedric the Entertainer, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, and Joshua Boone.

The production has also been praised for its creative team, including David Gallo’s scenic design, Paul Tazewell’s costumes, Stacey Derosier’s lighting, and Justin Ellington’s sound.

And that makes sense to me, because what I saw on stage felt deeply cared for… I went up to Debbie Allen on opening night and said, “You created a house that felt warm and welcoming, with a beautiful, strong Black loving couple.” I was fanning out a bit… I think that’s what I said. Ha!

August Wilson’s World

August Wilson is one of America’s great playwrights. His work stands among the finest in American theater. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are not just plays. They are cultural moments, slices of time. Each is a record. They are memory, music, history, grief, humor, pain, and survival placed in rooms where people talk, fight, laugh, love, and reveal themselves.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is part of Wilson’s Pittsburgh series; it is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding house run by Seth and Bertha Holly. It takes place during a period when many Black people were traveling, searching, migrating, arriving, leaving, and trying to understand what freedom meant after slavery and its aftermath had already marked their lives.

Wilson’s play does not turn our history into a lecture. He puts it into his people. Into conversations. Into meals. Into jokes. Into grief. Into a song. Into a man looking for his wife.

Debbie Allen’s Direction

The production is clear and easy to understand. It does not wrap itself up in unnecessary lighting sequences or theatrical tricks. There is one moment when the production moves into slow-motion, and I loved it. But overall, the words and behavior are the thing.

There is a love you can feel in how this play was treated.

When a Black woman directs a play about Black people with care, the lens is different. We are not made harsh. We are not flattened. We are not reduced to suffering or spectacle. We are presented as human beings with a full spectrum of emotions: vulnerability, power, love, jealousy, acceptance, understanding, compassion, curiosity, humor, and pain.

The characters are complicated, but they are not punished for being human.

That is important.

The Play

The first thing I noticed was the set. When you come into the theater, there is no curtain, so it’s there… and it’s a feast for your eyes. David Gallo’s scenic design was beautiful because it felt like a real place. It felt traditional in the best way. Sometimes, theater leans into abstraction, and sometimes that works. Sometimes it does not. I thought about the Death of a Salesman production with Wendell Pierce, which had a more abstract stage design. For me, that staging distracted from the living room, the kitchen, the home where Willy Loman lived with his family.

This set did not distract me. It brought me in. It was a boarding house that felt like a home. There was a kitchen, with a long kitchen table, the heart of the house. A more formal living room, center stage was a door… where you could see the silhouettes of those coming and going.

There were doorways leading outside to the backyard and to other rooms. People entered and exited constantly. And then there were these stairs. At first, I noticed how treacherous they looked, and then I started wondering what they meant. Were they a metaphor? A way to show the movement between the public and private spaces of the house? A path to rest, sex, escape, or retreat? Or were they ascending to someone who was higher?! Or maybe I am overcomplicating things, and they were just simply part of the architecture of the production?

I would love to ask Debbie Allen about those stairs. Whatever the intent, the house worked. It gave the characters somewhere to be. It gave the story a body.

Seth and Bertha

Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson had an amazing rapport. I believed they were a couple. I believed they had spent more than two decades together. I believed they had love, rhythm, history, frustration, and a private language between them.

I really want people to see that… their partnership and laughter. A home built by two people who know each other deeply.I love watching a Black couple love each other on stage. That’s why, for me, the emotional center of the production was Seth and Bertha Holly. Sure, I loved the kitchen… but Taraji P. Henson gave it life. At one point, Bertha is making biscuits at the table, talking and making them, and the flour kicks up into the air. She used the biscuit dough for emphasis. I smiled, because how many times have I personally seen or done that… quite a few. It was not a fake stage gesture. It felt lived in. Taraji’s Bertha was comfortable there. She flicked her towel. She moved her hips. She worked in the kitchen like a woman who knew every inch of that space. The cooking wasn’t just business, and the prepping and using the pots and pans were not just props. They were part of her world.

Taraji’s Bertha was the heart of the house. She listened. She helped. She offered advice. She reminded people to find their laughter. She was joy, but not soft in a weak way. She had strength, steadiness, and presence.

Cedric’s Seth is probably not highly educated, but he is very smart. He knows how to negotiate. He knows how to compute numbers. He understands wages, money, work, and how to make the right moves to protect what he has built. That kind of intelligence is not always presented with this much care in literature or theater, especially for a Black working man.

Cedric was wonderful. He was funny, warm, serious, and commanding. His timing was impeccable. He brought humor, but he also brought authority. Seth is the man of the house, and Cedric made you feel that.

Together, Seth and Bertha created something larger than a boarding house. They created a place where people could arrive with whatever they were carrying.

They were strict with boundaries, but warm and welcoming. People could come there, rest their heads, eat, talk, recover, and maybe find some part of themselves.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson Holds It Down

Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Bynum Walker was spectacular.

Bynum is a root man, a conjure man, a spiritual presence in the house. He seems like someone who has been there a very long time, someone who has seen enough to know that life is not just what is visible.

Santiago-Hudson was on par with the two leads. He held it down. He was funny, strange, grounded, mysterious, and completely alive. He made every scene partner feel richer. Every time he played a scene with someone, they seemed funnier, more interesting, more open.

That is a gift.

Bynum could have easily become too broad or too mystical, but Santiago-Hudson kept him human. He was not just “the voodoo man” or the spiritual character in the corner. He was a man with power, humor, history, and longing.

Joshua Boone’s Harold Loomis

Joshua Boone’s Harold Loomis was powerful.

Loomis is a man of mystery, a man carrying pain so deep it has altered the way he moves through the world. He arrives with his daughter, searching for the wife he lost after Joe Turner took him. He is free now, but he is not free from his past.

That distinction matters.

I was very invested in Harold Loomis finding his freedom. I wanted him to be free to love and laugh again, just like Bertha!

Boone gave us a man who was both strong and vulnerable. I liked being able to watch that on stage. When it mattered, this broken man found the ability to communicate his pain and make a decision that surprised me.

That moment landed.

The Young People, Desire, and Impulse

There are familiar character types in Wilson’s world, and they show up here too.

Molly Cunningham, played by Maya Boyd, could easily be seen as the sexually confident woman, the kind of character who appears in different forms in plays like The Piano Lesson. But Molly is more interesting than that. She is not just there to be desired. She is a woman who has decided she is not messing around with anybody trifling anymore. That is not her game.

Jeremy Furlow, played by Tripp Taylor, is young, sexual, impulsive, and unable to see far down the road. He cannot really hear the advice from the older people in the room. Seth, Bertha, and Bynum try to guide him, but he is not able to slow down long enough to receive it.

That will likely be his downfall. We don’t know for sure, but we can only imagine.

Molly and Jeremy represent something recognizable: youth, desire, impulsiveness, the feeling that everything must happen now. They are not the whole play, but they show us what it looks like when people are driven by appetite and urgency rather than wisdom.

Mattie Campbell, played by Nimene Sierra Wureh, is another character people clearly connected with. I spoke to some people after the play who were really moved by her. I did not connect with her in the same way, not because she was not played beautifully, but because I didn’t want Harold to go back… I wanted him to be free from his past. I wanted him to walk forward to something new. That’s my own stuff right there.

And then there are the children. Zonia, Loomis’s daughter, and the young boy she meets bring in a kind of innocence. They remind us what a simple connection feels like before life complicates everything. You meet someone. You make a friend. Maybe you have a little kiss, and suddenly that person is yours. Life could be that simple. Their interactions happen in the yard, stage front. But inside the house, center stage, everything is more complicated.

Beauty of Detail

I liked the costume design. The clothes felt real. By real, I mean worn. They did not have that shiny quality some stage costumes have, where everything looks like the thread has never been touched by life.

The hair design was also excellent. I was obsessed with Taraji’s hair because it was so good. Molly Cunningham’s hair was delicious too, an updo of the period, but with our hair. It felt specific. It felt textured. It felt right.

There was a range of shades, body types, and faces among the actors on stage. I am not sure exactly how to say this, but it felt full. It did not feel like one narrow idea of the people who would travel through this house. It felt like a real community.

The music mattered too. The guitar, the feet, the stomping, the rhythm, all of it felt connected to Wilson’s theatrical language. Music often lives inside his plays, whether it is a piano, a guitar, a voice, or the body itself becoming percussion. Here, the sound and movement helped root the play in culture, memory, and spirit.

Honestly, I would love to stay at this boarding house for a week for two dollars. I would happily have Sunday breakfast with chicken and biscuits, mind my business, listen to everybody talk, and maybe leave with a nice little love satchel for under my pillow and a teapot made by Seth.

That is the beauty of this production. It makes the house feel like a place you could enter.

But it also makes clear that this is not just a house. It is a place where people come carrying history. Some are looking for love. Some are looking for work. Some are looking for themselves. Some are looking for the dead, or the missing, or the parts of their lives that were stolen from them.

People arrive at that house one way.

They do not all leave the same.

Final Thoughts

It’s something you should not miss!

Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson make Seth and Bertha’s marriage feel lived in, loving, and real. Ruben Santiago-Hudson is spectacular as Bynum. Joshua Boone brings power and vulnerability to Harold Loomis. The full cast gives the play texture, humor, restlessness, and emotional weight.

The kitchen. The biscuits. The stairs. The doorways. The people coming and going. The sense that this home, built by Seth and Bertha, could hold people long enough for something in them to shift.

That is theater.

That is August Wilson.

And in this production, it works.

Tickets for the 2026 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, starring Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, are available via Telecharge and joeturnerbway.com. Prices start around $67–$88, with options for digital lotteries ($49) and in-person rush tickets ($35–$45). It’s running until July 26th.

Victoria Bert is a writer and producer living in NYC with more than 30 years of experience. Over the course of her career, she has written, developed, and produced work across film, television, documentaries, reality TV, live programming, and digital platforms.

Transparency note: I’m the Executive Director of Wocstar Media. Our CEO, Gayle Jennings O’Byrne, is a co-producer on this Broadway production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

- Victoria Bert \ @victoriabnyc

This movie is about kicking ass, taking names, and raising hell all wrapped up in one very stylish horror-action ride.

I saw They Will Kill You at 10 am on a Saturday, which may not have been my best personal viewing strategy. I was awake, but barely. Still, even at that hour, I could tell that what I was about to watch, I was going to enjoy.

This is the kind of horror-action-comedy that may feel very familiar, but it is also very fun. It’s stylish, bloody, and completely committed to its own madness. It has a highly charged lead performance from Zazie Beetz, a strong emotional setup with her sister, dynamic fight choreography, and a deliciously strange Patricia Arquette.

Spoilers ahead.

There are also some outrageous pig-headed demon final boss battles!

The movie is alive. It has energy. It has visual confidence. It has humor. It has emotional stakes. And most importantly, it knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be.

The story follows Asia Reaves, played by Zazie Beetz, an ex-convict who takes a live-in housekeeping job at The Virgil, a mysterious luxury high-rise in New York City. But she is not really there for the job. She is there because her younger sister Maria disappeared while working in that same building years earlier.

That setup works because the movie does not start with the building. It starts with the sisters… in the rain. Everything happens in the rain, by the way!

We meet Asia and Maria ten years earlier, running from their abusive father. They are desperate, scared, and trying to survive. The scene is confusing in the best way because you do not immediately know what kind of danger they are in. Is he their father? A trafficker? A bounty hunter? The movie drops you into the threat before it explains it. Asia ends up shooting him, but not killing him. She runs off to escape the cops, leaving Maria behind, and still gets caught by the police. She goes to prison. This is where she learned to fight.

That is the movie’s emotional engine.

Asia is not just trying to survive a haunted building. She is trying to make up for having abandoned her sister once. That guilt is what keeps her moving. That is what makes the violence matter. She is not just fighting cultists, monsters, and rich people who refuse to die. She is fighting her way back to Maria.

And once she gets to The Virgil, the movie really starts to play with our expectations.

The building itself is dark and moody, like something out of an American Horror Story. It’s colorful and Art Deco. Fantastic. It feels like a trap from the second Asia walks in. The doors lock with that heavy, terrifying clang clang clang.

She meets a few of the residents. Typical weirdos for this type of film, nothing too strange to see here. Yet.

Patricia Arquette plays Lilith, the building manager, who shows her around and takes her to her room. She is as peculiar. She is creepy, funny, elegant, and completely committed. She understands the movie she is in. So does Heather Graham. So does Tom Felton. Everyone is operating in the same heightened, sinister, slightly ridiculous universe, which is why the tone works. It is campy without becoming sloppy. It is funny without becoming unserious.

The movie reminded me of a lot of things without feeling like a copy of any one thing. There is a little Kill Bill in the color and movement. A little John Wick in the impossible physicality. A little Cabin in the Woods in the sense that the space itself has been designed to trap people. And yes, there is a Dante’s Inferno feeling to the whole thing, with the floors functioning like levels of hell.

But They Will Kill You has its own weird flavor.

The first major attack in Asia’s room is where the movie shows you what it is really doing. A cultist comes through the air duct and the refrigerator. Asia fights back, and suddenly, we are in full action mode. The fight choreography is physical and frenetic. Zazie Beetz is completely believable in the physicality of the role, even when the movie itself is heightened and ridiculous. She is fast, tough, smart, and relentless.

I loved watching her fight. What I also appreciated is that the movie gives us a reason for her skill. Through flashbacks, we see that Asia learned how to survive violence long before she ever entered The Virgil. She fought because she had to. She fought in prison. She fought because pain was part of her life before this supernatural nightmare ever began.

That matters because Asia is never treated like a damsel. She is not waiting to be saved. She is not confused for long. She is scared, yes. Hurt, yes. Overwhelmed, yes. But she is not helpless. Once the movie puts a machete in her hand, it is off to the races.

And then the movie reveals the big rule: the people in this building cannot die. Limbs grow back. Heads reattach. Bodies regenerate. Someone loses an eyeball, and the eyeball keeps moving through the building like a deranged little cartoon spy.

That is where the story ramps up, and we really wonder how she will get out of this.

It should not work, but it does because the movie fully commits to it. There is a scene where the eyeball has to get up through the ducts, and it literally bounces its way up. It is absurd. It is disgusting. It is clever. I loved it.

This is also where the movie avoids one of my biggest horror pet peeves.

In so many slashers now, people get stabbed, gutted, thrown, beaten, and somehow continue like they have a mild cramp. That drives me crazy when the movie wants us to believe these are regular human beings. Here, the movie gives us a rule. These people are immortal because of the ritual. They can be hurt, but they regenerate. That means the over-the-top violence has logic behind it. You are not sitting there wondering why no one is dying. You are sitting there wondering how Asia is ever going to win.

That is a much better problem.

The cult itself is made up of ultra-wealthy residents who sacrifice staff to maintain their immortality. That is not subtle, and it does not need to be. The rich literally feeding on workers to live forever is a pretty clear metaphor, but the movie is smart enough to wrap it in blood, comedy, and action instead of stopping to lecture you.

The Virgil is not just a building. It is a luxury death machine.

Asia fights in the room. She crawls through ducts. She moves through hidden spaces. She ends up in kitchens, elevator shafts, back rooms, and finally the frozen upper floor, where the demonic rituals happen.

The reunion between Asia and Maria gives the movie its emotional weight. Maria is not just waiting to be rescued. She is angry. She feels abandoned. She has been living inside this nightmare for years, and she has made her own choices. That makes the sister dynamic more interesting. Asia wants to save her. Maria is not sure she wants to be saved.

It would have been easy to make Maria purely innocent, purely grateful, or purely villainous. Instead, the movie gives her resentment. She knows Asia left her behind, even if Asia had reasons, even if Asia was a child herself, even if the situation was impossible. Maria’s anger makes sense. Asia’s guilt makes sense. Their relationship gives the movie something real underneath all the blood and flames.

By the time they are fighting together, it feels earned.

The final act goes completely insane, in the best way.

The top floor is freezing, the cult is gathered, and Satan is basically represented through a severed pig’s head. The image is ridiculous and creepy at the same time. There is fog, cold air, ritualistic nonsense, names written on skin, and Patricia Arquette going full final boss.

I know some people may bump up against the pig head. I did not. Once a movie gives me immortal rich cultists, regenerating limbs, a sentient eyeball, and a high-rise portal to hell, I am willing to go with the pig.

The rules of the ritual are actually very clever. The cultists maintain immortality through names written on the pig’s skin. When a name is removed or erased, they lose that protection. So when Maria is told she must kill Asia to become immortal, the movie sets us up to expect her to betray her sister.

And then the twist lands.

Maria writes Asia’s name instead and sacrifices herself, making Asia immortal.

That got me. I did not see it coming, and I love it when a movie can still surprise me inside a genre structure I understand. For a second, you are trying to catch up emotionally. Why did Maria do that? What did she write? What just happened? And then Asia does not die. She starts fighting back with immortality on her side, and suddenly, the whole movie flips.

Asia figures out how the ritual works, destroys the pig head, burns the names, and all the immortal residents finally die. It is satisfying because the movie clearly sets up the rule, making the ending feel earned. It is not random. It is not magic for magic’s sake. It pays off.

Asia escapes with Maria’s body, gets outside, and uses the piece of pig skin with her own name on it to change it to Maria’s name. Maria comes back. The poor man driving the car is understandably confused. And the sisters ride away.

It is clever, emotional, and funny. That is a hard combination to pull off.

What I liked most about They Will Kill You is that it never forgets to be entertaining. It is about guilt, family, survival, revenge, atonement, class, exploitation, and women refusing to be victims. But it is also about Zazie Beetz fighting immortal cult members with a flaming axe.

That balance matters.

It is very easy for horror with ideas to become too self-serious. It is also easy for horror-comedy to become weightless. This movie finds a lane in the middle. It has real stakes, but it also lets itself be gross, funny, and absurd.

Zazie Beetz is the reason it holds together. She is fantastic. She gives Asia toughness without turning her into a machine. You can see the exhaustion. You can see the pain. You can see the guilt. You can see the “I am not stopping” energy in her body. She is not invincible until the story literally makes her invincible, and even then, the emotion stays grounded.

Myha’la is also as strong as Maria. She brings the anger and hurt that the sister relationship needs. Patricia Arquette is having a ball. Heather Graham is weird and funny. The whole supporting cast understands the assignment.

The design is gorgeous. The fight choreography is beautiful. The makeup and special effects are great. The regeneration effects are disgusting in the right way. The pig at the end is unbelievable. The movie looks rich, slick, bloody, and playful.

It gives us a Black woman lead who is messy, guilty, damaged, brave, and impossible to stop. It gives us a sister story inside a demonic high-rise bloodbath. It gives us rich people literally sacrificing workers to live forever. It gives us Patricia Arquette, a flaming axe, a bouncing eyeball, and a pig head from hell.

Final verdict: I enjoyed They Will Kill You. It feels familiar in the way many action-horror movies do now, with the trapped building, the impossible fights, the bodies that will not stay down, and the video-game-style survival levels. But familiarity is not always a bad thing when the movie is this much fun. Zazie Beetz is fantastic, the action works, the design is gorgeous, Patricia Arquette is having a ball, and the sister story gives the bloodbath an emotional reason to exist. It is violent, funny, stylish, ridiculous, and fully committed to its own madness. Sometimes that is exactly what I want from a genre movie.

Now that They Will Kill You has dropped on VOD, this is the perfect time to catch it. Stream it, enjoy the madness, and let it be exactly what it is: a familiar but very fun genre ride that kicks ass and takes names.

- \ @victoriabnyc

Michael is a moving, imperfect, and deeply watchable film that reminded me why Michael Jackson’s music still reaches across generations.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson, with Colman Domingo, Nia Long, Miles Teller, Laura Harrier, Kat Graham, Larenz Tate, Jessica Sula, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, and Kendrick Sampson, Michael is a film wrestling with genius, family, trauma, spectacle, and the impossible task of telling a story about a complicated life.

Before I get into Michael, let me say this: I am not here to hand down final verdicts. I am here as one person who loves movies, has studied them, worked around them, and talked about them for decades.

I write about culture, marketing, and media on my Substack, Let’s Talk About It. I co-host a film and streaming podcast, The Watchers, with Kevin Marable, the founder of TheBlkScript Network. Now I’m adding even more to the conversation by writing reviews here on Blkscript.com.

Please also feel free to share your perspective in the comments. It’s okay to have different feelings about movies.

Another note: if I watch it, I am always rooting for it to win, for it to work.

Now that all that is out of the way, let’s talk about it.

Michael comes in hot with “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” from the Thriller album. You are immediately transported back to 1982.

The music and his songs are beautifully represented, but I was never really worried that the music would be the problem. I was more concerned about how they would tell his life story. Would it feel like a trial, an explanation, or a condemnation? Maybe some people wanted that. I did not.

The musical numbers really show you something about Michael’s talent. Of course, we already knew he was talented. That is not new. But the movie shows his creativity in a different light. It shows how much he wanted to push music beyond one lane, making it multi-layered storytelling, a real spectacle, and a movement all at once.

Thriller was my favorite musical sequence because it showed that creative ambition so clearly. It reminded you that Michael was not only performing songs. He was building worlds around them.

The film could have gone deeper into his creative process, songwriting, the music industry, his creative choices, and how he ran his concerts, sessions, or rehearsals. Did he become the taskmaster? I would have loved to see more of his process. Instead, it was montages. Beautiful ones, all the same.

I also would have loved a more realistic portrayal of the music industry. As A Tribe Called Quest famously said, “Rule 4080, record company people are shady.” That would have been interesting to dig into more. Instead, the record executives were some of his biggest champions.

The movie went more down the lane of music, performance, family trauma, and Michael’s rise to stardom amid dysfunction.

His abuse, his hoarding of animals, his obsession with Peter Pan, and his desire to stay childlike are told pretty simplistically. Quite matter-of-factly. I wanted more depth there, but I also understand that this movie is not trying to become a full psychological excavation of Michael Jackson. It gives us pieces. Some of them work better than others.

The portrayals of the family left me in real discomfort.

In my opinion, the movie sets up both his parents as villains.

Colman Domingo’s Joe Jackson is complex, disturbing, and difficult to watch. He is an abusive father with a serious intent to make his children more than he was. Abusive, yes. But also, in the film’s portrayal, someone who never has a come-to-Jesus moment. Someone who possibly thought he was protecting his sons by pushing them into success. That is what makes it so uncomfortable.

We have seen versions of this kind of character, a Black father figure, before, like King Richard. A parent who sees something in a child pushes the child toward greatness, and here, the father crosses the line. He is a terror. It is hard to watch.

Domingo’s Joe Jackson is a complex, deeply flawed, violent, and angry man, only slightly presenting ambition and drive through the mask of lifting his children out of poverty. But right underneath are the narcissism, jealousy, and hate.

The film shows that Joe’s wrath was focused on Michael. But we don’t know if that’s true. We do not fully know from this movie whether he abused the other children in the same way, but we definitely see that Michael becomes the target of his cruelty. On the whole, Joe Jackson gets the closest thing to a villain arc, a consequence for his actions. He pushes them to success, and then he is pushed out.

Nia Long’s portrayal of Katherine Jackson was layered. She was an unsympathetic character to me because I could not understand how a mother watches her husband beat her children and does nothing. That is hard for me.

The film bounces between showing her as this strong mother who eventually stands up for Michael, but it felt a little too late. You don’t see any apparent reason she ignores the abuse. Are we supposed to believe that is just what Black mothers do? No. I needed to know her reasons for not protecting Michael or leaving Joe. And when she finally steps in and protects Michael, it feels like a third-act action as opposed to something driven by character. Nia does give the character depth. I could see the fear, the faith, the survival, the denial, and the limitation of her fortitude and strength. I think I understood what the film wanted me to feel. I just could not fully get past what she allowed.

The movie is a bit top-heavy: a lot of setup, a wide story, and not enough depth.

For example, I wanted more of the brothers. I wanted more of LaToya. I wanted more of Janet. I understand Janet did not want to be a part of it. That is unfortunate because more dynamics between the family members would have given us more heart and more understanding.

Jaafar Jackson’s performance is transcendent. There were times when I forgot I was not watching the real person, and that is what a movie is supposed to do. It is supposed to take you somewhere. It is supposed to suspend your disbelief.

He captures the movement, the posture, the voice, the softness, the stage presence, and the way Michael seemed to exist in his own weather system.

We witnessed the results of his trauma. We saw many times that even after being rich enough to leave, Michael stayed. The movie assumed we would understand that the repercussions of his abuse would be a trauma bond that mixed love, guilt, and hate.

You really get a sense of Michael’s isolation as a result of being famous from such a young age. He was surrounded by people, but still alone, left to play with his pets to replace real friendships.

Another aspect that would have been interesting to see more of was the celebrities and the high-net-worth world around him. We did not see Prince. We did not see Donna Summer. We did not get the folks who would have been in his orbit. We saw a few, Quincy Jones and Don King, but really, that larger world was missing. It would have been exciting to show the world he was moving through, not just the stages he performed on.

I also would have liked to see more of his personal life. Let’s say, for example, Brooke Shields. They had a real friendship. It would have been interesting to see that brought to life. Some glimpse of real friendships. Some sense of who he was when he was not performing or creating, not with family, and not in business mode.

The supporting characters they focused on were a mixed bag. The actors were very good. For example, Miles Teller played his attorney and manager, John Branca, and he did strong work.

Billy Bray, his head of security and bodyguard, played by KeiLyn Durrel Jones, was underdeveloped as a character. I would have liked to see more of him. I understand it is hard to know what really transpired between the two of them, but the movie sets him up in a way that made me want a stronger payoff. Joe Jackson hires him and says, “Protect my son,” and then Billy protects Michael from his own father. Nice. But I would have liked to have gone deeper in the middle. That felt like a missed opportunity.

The directing was grand and big. I saw it on an IMAX screen, and this kind of story was built for that kind of scale. Montages were the main way the film moved through time, with slates indicating the year. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it made the film feel like a string of music videos with narrative scenes in between, which affected the intimacy.

I love scenes that create private reflection, when characters are alone and obviously unaware we are watching. We get to glimpse behind the veil and see human behavior. In this movie, Michael often felt as if someone were watching. Maybe that was intentional. Maybe that is part of who Michael was, a person who had been watched since childhood and never fully knew how to stop performing. But it also kept me at a distance from him.

Let me say it again. Jaafar Jackson was brilliant. Michael was obviously channeling creativity, so much so that it feels miraculous. Jaafar captured an inspired artist in the flow. He embodied that character’s spirit so perfectly. But was there any room for complexity?

I saw Myles Frost play Michael Jackson on Broadway, and he was brilliant, too. It might have been interesting to see someone who is not related to him, someone who is not attached to a particular family legacy, play him in the film. Someone more objective might have brought a different edge, maybe a darker or messier note.

That is not a knock on Jaafar. He is extraordinary. But because he is so connected to Michael, there may be places the performance cannot go, or chooses not to go.

The Pepsi commercial accident was very hard to watch. I remember when that happened, but I do not think I ever really understood how serious it was. Watching it unfold close up again was scary.

Now, about the scandal.

This is a review of a movie about a really complicated human being. And to tell a person’s story before the major scandal of their life, it has to be told from the perspective that we do not yet know about the scandal. That is the linear aspect of being alive. People wanting the film to address it directly is complicated because, for most of the movie’s timeline, that part of the story has not happened yet.

I think the film chooses to celebrate the music and give us Michael before the public dismantling of his image. Some people will reject that choice. I understand that. But I also understand why this movie exists in the frame it chooses.

The movie's ending was an odd choice; I did not quite understand it. It ends with a slate that says more story is coming. Okay, that was a bit of a letdown.

I had an alternative idea. What if he finishes a concert, goes into a dressing room by himself, and then looks at himself in the mirror?

Cue “Man in the Mirror” underneath.

Fade to black.

That may not be perfect either, but it’s better than just a slate. It would have given us reflection. It would have let us sit with him. It would have connected the public performance to the private human being. I would have liked that.

Final thoughts: this movie allowed me to hear and experience his music again, this time with a crowd. I was happy. That made it worth every minute. I think people are going to go see this movie because, as the character says, music crosses boundaries and lines.

The movie is flawed. It is top-heavy. It skips things I wanted to see. It leaves some relationships underdeveloped. It gives us spectacle when I sometimes wanted intimacy. It gives us genius when I sometimes wanted more humanity. It gives us the music industry, but not enough of it. It gives us family pain, but not always enough family texture. It peaks at Neverland. It shows isolation, animals, Peter Pan, and the desire to stay childlike, but does not fully unpack those threads.

But the musical numbers lift the film past many of its flaws.

I was reminded of what it felt like to love his music before the world around the music became more complicated.

That is the movie’s power.

Rating: Enjoyed It