Film Review: Psycho Killer 魔殺手 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 5/10
Rating: ★ ★ 1/2
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
I went in knowing two things: the writer of Se7en had been sitting on this script since the mid-2000s, and almost nobody who saw it in February had a kind word. That combination usually produces either a buried masterpiece or a film that explains why it stayed in a drawer. Psycho Killer is closer to the drawer.
Georgina Campbell plays Jane Archer, a Kansas highway patrol officer who arrives at a traffic stop in time to watch her husband die. The man who kills him is already a celebrity of sorts — the Satanic Slasher, a hulking figure in a gas mask who leaves occult slogans in blood and moves from state to state as if the interstate system were a ritual circuit. Jane takes leave. She drives. The movie drives with her.
Campbell is the reason to stay. She does not play grief as a single note. She plays it as a job that has suddenly become personal and therefore slightly insane. You believe she would do this. You also believe the film has no idea what to do with her once the premise is stated. She is a grown woman and a cop in a movie that keeps wanting to be a slasher about teenagers in the woods. The two modes cancel each other.
James Preston Rogers, the former wrestler, is cast as presence rather than person. That is not automatically a mistake. Michael Myers was presence. What Rogers is not given is a point of view. The mask is striking. The body is striking. The “agenda” the ads promised never becomes more than graffiti and a late detour into Malcolm McDowell’s mansion, where McDowell, as a satanist with a coke problem, seems to have wandered in from a better, nastier comedy. I was glad to see him. I wished the movie around him were as alive as his line readings.
Andrew Kevin Walker once understood that a serial killer film lives in the space between procedure and dread. Here the procedure is thin and the dread is postponed until it is too late. The kills are staged with a certain blunt commitment — this is not a timid movie — but they do not accumulate. They happen, and then the film cuts to Jane on another highway. Polone, a longtime producer making his first feature, shoots cleanly and without personality. Winnipeg stands in for a dozen American nowhere-towns and never becomes any of them.
There is a Talking Heads song with this title. David Byrne sang it as a man who cannot face the facts and cannot relax. The movie quotes the title and none of the unease. It is tense only in the way a checklist is tense. By the last act it has decided to be about something occult and apocalyptic, which would be fine if the first hour had been building toward anything other than mileage.
I did not hate it. That is fainter praise than it sounds. Campbell keeps her half of the bargain. Rogers fills the frame. McDowell reminds you what mischief looks like. The rest is a script that waited twenty years and still arrived undercooked. Two and a half stars is the rating for a film that has pieces and no whole — a movie you can describe accurately in one sentence and still not recommend. (Neo, 2026)