Movies
[Sundance Review] ‘Assassination Nation’: The Salem Wikileaks Trials
Assassination Nation opens with a trigger warning montage promising to offend everyone. While not every clip in the montage pays off as awesomely as you hope it will, Assassination Nation has something to say and the message pays off.
The town of Salem is going through a series of hacks where members of the community’s dirty secrets are leaked. Lily (Odessa Young) defends some of the accused while she and her friends become connected to some of the leaks.
Some of the sexual judgments are more horrifying than the violence. Lily’s group of girlfriends make rape jokes and are as sexual as teens really are, and lament the teen sex that is as disappointing as it can be. They call bullshit on guys who claim porn taught them how to fuck, because clearly, they have a lot to learn. Yet the leaks shame sexual activity that’s pretty healthy in private, and puts everyone in Salem on edge for who’s next.
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A principal is called a child pornographer for having a photo of his six-year-old daughter in the bath. I imagine maybe parents in 2018 reconsider documenting baby’s bath time, but I suspect their motivation was loving. It’s only gross if you have pictures of someone else’s kid.
The women are vilified for being as sexual as men are, yet men still want more. Writer/director Sam Levinson calls out the hypocrisy and phony righteousness of townspeople who were just as complicit in supposedly offensive activities. And he must’ve written this before the end of 2017 so it was really prescient. Now it’s a rallying cry for people to rise up against hypocrisy, as if they need more, but here’s another one.
It could escalate quicker but don’t worry. This movie still ends with the town trying to kill each other. At one point Lily is drenched in collateral blood, and the heroines become a four girl vengeance squad. The score has John Carpenter inspirations, both in the synth and the tempo.
Assassination Nation is really a buildup to the violence but the climax does not disappoint. So, I guess the message, besides the social messages of the film, is: wait for it.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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