
Aren’t you tired of fighting against your true nature? With holidays around the corner, Riley Stone (Imogen Poots) and her friends Jesse (Brittany O’Grady) and Marty (Lily Donoghue) prepare for a Christmas party at their sorority house at Hawthorne College. But when a masked stalker targets girls and goes on a killing spree following a series of threatening direct messages to the girls’ phones purportedly from the school’s slave-owning founder, they decide to fight back – but he’s in the house. Then they realise there’s more than one masked man to deal with and a girl is missing …Something doesn’t feel right. The woke millennial remake of Bob Clarke’s brilliant 1974 Canadian slasher, this plugs into campus stories from the past decade involving unwholesome fratboy rituals and a rape culture targeting female students. It ups the ante by also unpicking the masculinist backlash against women and the idea of safe spaces – all that and with a supernatural undercurrent too. Written by director Sofia Takal and April Wolfe, adapting the original screenplay by A. Roy Moore, the Final Girl narrative is therefore stunningly contemporary in its politics but that means the thrills take a bit of a back seat. There really is no room in the story for the geeky romantic Landon (Caleb Eberhardt) who might or might not help the girls but Cary Elwes is good as the lecturer whose misogyny rules the roost. Riley is a good character but she never rises to the occasion, as it were, and needs help – so you might say that this heroine’s journey is very much a group endeavour as she is forced to come to terms with a past sexual assault. Truly a tribute to the notion of sorority. You used to be a fighter. It’s time to be a fighter again. If not for yourself for your sisters