Scream VI Review: Ghostface Takes Manhattan

For 27 years, the Scream slasher franchise has existed as a suburban nightmare. Even when the action moved to Los Angeles for Scream 3, the characters still faced down Ghostface on the wooden planks of a Hollywood set, a facsimile of their very own small-town trauma.

Now, with Scream VI, franchise custodians Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett move the four survivors of last year’s Scream to the streets of New York City. While Tara (Jenna Ortega) attends the fictional Blackmore College, Samantha (Melissa Barrera) holds down two jobs and, much to Tara’s protestation, keeps a close eye on her younger sister’s whereabouts. Twins Mindy and Chad (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding, respectively) also return, and everyone is dealing with the horrors of the past with a wide range of success.

Sam berates Tara for her avoidance of her emotional trauma, yet she’s the one who can’t stop shopping for therapists while Tara seems well-adjusted, going to parties and flirting with boys. In secret, Sam is hooking up with her neighbor, Danny (Josh Segarra), and good-naturedly putting up with the frequent partying of her new roommate, Quinn (Liana Liberato). Sam and Tara aren’t getting along great, but they put aside their squabbles when NYPD Detective Wayne Bailey (Dermot Mulroney) questions them over the news that two of their film studies classmates have been found with Ghostface masks next to their bodies.

In spite of some hokey banter and set pieces that play out on obvious Canada-as-New York locales, Scream VI sets itself up with an efficient, satisfying awareness of the series lineage. There’s a phone call, a MacGuffin, and lots of murder victims. But where the prior film was mired in a leaden-footed self-seriousness, Scream VI rediscovers the cynical morbidity of humor that so defined Wes Craven’s first four films. The kills are intricately staged and extremely tense, topped by the film’s most well-sustained sequence, in which Ghostface and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) lock horns inside the broadcaster’s expansive Upper West Side penthouse.

Still, Scream VI is, somehow, at once too ridiculous and not nearly ridiculous enough. It flirts with camp but fails to fully commit to it, and as a result the film sits awkwardly between fidelity to its origins and the need to move the franchise forward. Part of the way that it attempts to do so is by dealing with the glaring absence of Sidney. The screenplay deals with her loss quickly but poorly, seemingly referencing Neve Campbell’s very public exit from the franchise.

In fact, any time that Scream VI has to move the story forward it gets into trouble. For one, the members of the “core four,” as Chad obnoxiously refers to them repeatedly, aren’t very well delineated. Ortega fantastically embodies the role of the precocious young college student who’s also a trauma victim, but the rest of the main players are all visibly tripped up by the script’s incessant winking at the self-referentialism that defines the franchise.

Exemplified by the supremely fake-looking, NYU-like Blakemore College, the film is further addled by an uneven use of location. A handful of kills and chases take advantage of New York’s spatial specificity, like an extended subway ride from the Upper West Side to Washington Square (though the same sequence boasts awfully convenient flickering lights). Other sequences, though, including the film’s cold open and the final showdown, rely on baffling spaces and preposterous contrivances. The latter is especially silly, and much of the last act’s logic relies on a convoluted scenario that collapses in on itself the minute that it’s revealed.

The film’s vision of New York as a playground for vicious, senseless murder, where anyone could be a knife-wielding sociopath, is regressive and distorted, but the filmmakers have fun playing with the popular notion of the city that’s held by people with little lived New York experience. Yet, everything in between the electrifying kills feels like a middling episode of Law & Order, partly due to the presence of Hayden Panettiere, who reprises her role as Kirby Reed from Scream 4. Panettiere is one of the franchise’s best assets, but the writers have turned her into a plucky F.B.I. agent, and her banter with Mulroney, coupled with the televisual look of many scenes, persistently deflate any sense of urgency the film might otherwise have.

Metatextuality isn’t interesting in and of itself—it matters for what purpose self-referentialism exists. In lieu of more pointed statements about tired franchise tropes, jokes about Letterboxd, references to Dario Argento’s gialli, and recycled music from the prior films are provided for no reason than for us to offer our nods of recognition. With nothing new to say about the state of modern horror or the toxicity of late-stage Hollywood capitalism, Scream VI barely resembles the film that birthed the franchise back in 1996. It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.