Spiral of Destruction

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Serial killers, heartbreak, and a sinister AI.

TO CATCH A KILLER (2023)

When Shailene Woodley signed on to star in director Damián Szifron’s serial killer crime thriller To Catch a Killer (which, at the time, was going by the title Misanthrope), Woodley and everyone behind the scenes had great hopes for the film. Woodley said Szifron was going to deliver something that would have “a profound impact on cinema.” The CEO of the company providing financing said it would be “a decade-defining film.” But something went wrong along the way. First, the production was delayed: instead of filming by the end of 2019 as expected, it didn’t start filming until January of 2021, wrapping in March. It didn’t secure a distributor in the U.S. until November of 2022 and got a limited theatrical release in April of 2023, during which it only made $3 million worldwide. It did not have a profound impact on cinema, and it didn’t define the decade. Most movie-goers didn’t even notice that it had come and gone.

That’s too bad. The movie was never going to be the cinematic shake-up that Woodley and the CEO hyped it to be, but it is a pretty good thriller.

Scripted by Szifron and Jonathan Wakeham, the film begins on New Years Eve in Baltimore. As the clock strike midnight and fireworks go off, someone with an old sniper rifle starts picking people off in various locations that are visible from their high-rise window. They claim 29 victims in a matter of moments – and as soon as the police are able to pinpoint the source of their shots, the place explodes.

The killer has escaped. FBI Agent Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) leads the investigation with BPD's cooperation, and when he hears a troubled young officer named Eleanor Falco (Woodley) make an intriguing remark that indicates she knows how the shooter is thinking, he pulls her into the investigation to be his trusted assistant. Together, Lammark and Falco work to figure out who the shooter is before anyone else can get hurt... but they’re not able to. He claims a lot more victims in a shopping mall along the way.

I can see why Woodley and CEO thought To Catch a Killer might be impactful. This being an age of mass shootings, it’s understandable that they thought a movie about the authorities trying to stop a mass shooter would be something that would draw a lot of attention. But, while there are scenes that are quite intense and troubling, the movie does still come off as just another crime thriller, and another one that drew inspiration from The Silence of the Lambs. Other movies may not have dealt with the mass shooter concept like this one does, but it still comes off as a version of something we’ve seen before.

That said, it is a good version of those scenarios and characters we’ve seen before. If you’re a fan of this type of thriller, To Catch a Killer is absolutely worth checking out. It didn’t deserve to flop and disappear like it did.

COMING HOME (1978)

Following the death of Robert Carradine at the end of February, I have been on a spree of Robert Carradine movie watching. He doesn't have a big enough role in this movie for my liking, but it had to be part of the viewing spree because it’s the only movie he was in to earn a Best Picture nomination. It lost that honor to Annie Hall, but did take home the gold in three of the eight categories it was nominated in: Best Actor (Jon Voight), Best Actress (Jane Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Waldo Salt, Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd).

This was the first film from Fonda’s production company, IPC Films, and was inspired by her friendship with paraplegic Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic (whose story was told in the Oliver Stone/Tom Cruise movie Born on the Fourth of July). 

Set in 1968, Coming Home, directed by Hal Ashby, sees Fonda playing a military wife who volunteers at a Veterans Administration hospital while her husband (Bruce Dern) is serving in Vietnam. During her time at the hospital, she falls for and starts having an affair with paraplegic veteran Luke Martin (Voight). Heartbreak and tragedy ensue.

Carradine plays Bill Munson, a veteran with PTSD who has a tragic side story of his own. This was always an emotionally impactful film, but the circumstances of Carradine’s own death have made his character’s story here even more difficult to watch. He did an incredible job in the role, though, and that’s something to celebrate.

With a very grounded, realistic portrayal of doomed characters and veterans who have been damaged both physically and mentally, Coming Home makes for a heavy viewing experience, but it is a great movie from a great director that features some great performances. It also has a cool soundtrack, featuring The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Steppenwolf, multiple Rolling Stones songs, and more.

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 3 (2026)

The Strangers franchise launched in 2008 with a very well-received home invasion horror film – and even though the writer/director quickly started working on a sequel, that sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, didn’t come along until 2018, with a different director and a rewritten script. Now, the franchise has been expanded in a major way with a relaunch trilogy that was shot back-to-back-to-back by director Renny Harlin. It got started with The Strangers: Chapter 1, which was basically a rewrite of the original The Strangers, just with slightly different characters and circumstances, introducing trilogy heroine Maya, played by Madelaine Petsch. Chapter 2 picked up right where the previous entry ended and was basically one long chase sequence.

The homicidal, masked strangers are Pin-Up Girl, Dollface, and Scarecrow (formerly known as the Man in the Mask), and Maya is still running for her life as trilogy capper Chapter 3 gets started... but she has managed to take one of the strangers out, and we get to see how the other strangers handle that loss. As it turns out, Maya has proven to be so resilient that the remaining strangers want to have her replace the killer she killed. And Maya is such a weak character, she sort of goes along with her tormentors’ wishes at times, proving to be one of the worst heroines in horror history. It sucks that we had to follow such a crappy character through three whole movies.

Now that we’re deep into this franchise, it’s no surprise that the filmmakers have decided to start revealing information about the strangers’ identities – or at least, the identities of this iteration of the strangers, since most of these characters were already killed off in Prey at Night. Chapter 2 revealed that one of the strangers is a local waitress, and we got flashbacks to her childhood days, building up to the first murder she committed. The male stranger was also involved in those flashbacks, and in this movie we learn how the third stranger got pulled into the mix. It’s completely unnecessary, but not unexpected. The longer a series goes on, the more the mystery goes away. By the time this trilogy is over, zero mystery remains – and, thankfully, there’s no chance that we’ll ever have to watch this lame version of the strangers ever again.

I welcomed this trilogy with open arms, especially since Renny Harlin was on board to direct and he has made movies that I really like over the decades. He even directed what I find to be the most entertaining sequel in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, part 4: The Dream Master. Unfortunately, these movies are far from the cool and stylish Dream Master, and Harlin was working from lackluster scripts supplied by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland. I found Chapters 1 and 2 to be fine time-killers, but the trilogy really craps out with Chapter 3, which I found to be nothing but a frustrating bummer.

Maya sucks. The strangers suck. The best thing Chapter 3 has going for it is the sheriff, who is played by genre regular Richard Brake and is named Rotter. But Rotter can’t save this mess.

The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

SERENA (2026)

The “Screenlife” style of filmmaking is one I’m still hesitant to embrace. Every time I encounter a movie where all of the events play out on the screens of various devices, I groan mentally and debate whether or not I should give it a chance – this despite the fact that I have enjoyed several Screenlife movies over the years: Unfriended, Host, Missing. They tend to work better for me than “found footage” movies do, yet they still need to win me over every time. Director Rob Alicea’s thriller Serena is the latest Screenlife movie I’ve given a chance to... and it was the latest one to win me over.

Serena stars Steven Strait as musician Chris Sadowski, who once enjoyed success with his band Ghost Agent and even counted Matt Pinfield as an enthusiastic supporter. These days, Chris is down on his luck. While he has gotten sober and his love life appears to be in good condition – his partner Vicki (María Gabriela González), who will take every opportunity to quote Han Solo dialogue (and she is given plenty of opportunities) is pregnant with their first child – everything else is crumbling down around him. He’s dealing with a creative block and he and Vicki are struggling to pay their bills. Vicki doesn’t know it yet, but they’ve even been served with an eviction notice and will have to move out of their home in a week if Chris can’t come up with a couple thousand dollars in the next 48 hours.

Just when things are looking their most dire, a lucky break: the tech company Nucleeus needs beta testers for their new eeChatbot, which they envision as being able to help people make every decision in their lives. Chris isn’t a fan of AI, but thanks to a friend on the inside (Tyrone Marshall Brown as Will Ramos), he’ll be paid $3000 rather than the standard $1000 to try this chatbot out and help it learn the difference between fact and fiction with a 75-minute survey. The test starts simple, with Chris interacting with text on a screen. But then the AI names itself Serena, finds a voice, and creates a face that she describes as being “the perfect balance of sexy and approachable.” Andi Matichak of the recent trilogy of Halloween sequels is the actress chosen to represent that balance.

At first, it seems that Serena could be greatly beneficial. If this AI is going to help people make every decision in their lives, it could guide them to success. But things get gradually more uncomfortable as the chatbot digs deeper and deeper into Chris’s personal life. They take a disturbing turn when it unearths some dark secrets he wasn’t aware of. And the movie gets really intense when Serena predicts that something very bad is going to happen very soon... maybe even before the test period is over.

Although Chris spends almost the entire running time sitting in front of his computer and interacting with Serena, there are several other actors in the film, as he has FaceTime calls with Vicki, Will, and others, and also interacts with some people who come to his door (which we see through a security camera). The supporting cast includes Ashleigh Murray, Nicole Gut, Alberto Bonilla, and Zebedee Row. But for the most part, the movie is carried on the shoulders of Strait and Matichak, and they both do great work in their roles. Strait gives a flawless performance as his character deals with some intensely emotional issues, and Matichak – who can only stand up straight and stare into the camera as her AI character – managed to make Serena come off as nice and helpful one moment, then sinister and deceptive the next.

With a running time of about 97 minutes, Serena is longer than you might expect, given the concept and content – but somehow, Alicea and writers Jonathan Benecke and P.T. Hylton were able to make the idea of a man talking to an AI chatbot sustain that running time. I would have expected this to drag at times, but I never felt like there was a dull moment. I was invested in seeing how things were going to turn out for Chris, and wanted to find out what was really going on with this chatbot Serena.

Serena had its world premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival on March 13, 2026. Distribution plans haven’t been announced yet, but it’s difficult to imagine that a distributor wouldn’t want to get this one out into the world as soon as possible. It’s an interesting, engaging thriller and one of the best modern “sinister AI” movies I’ve seen so far. It’s a Screenlife movie that wouldn’t have worked as well if the filmmakers had attempted to shoot it in a traditional style rather than focusing on Chris’s computer screen – and if/when you have the chance to see it, it’s definitely worth checking out.