Reviews
“Cruel Summer” Season 2 Review – Young Adult Series Returns With an Addictive New Mystery
The first season of Cruel Summer was an unexpected hit for Freeform back in 2021 when it became the No. 1 new cable drama among women. The series had a great hook: the story was divided across three years, each visually distinct, following the same characters as their circumstances changed in relation to a central mystery.
In season one, that was the kidnapping of a popular girl. In season two of showrunner Elle Triedman‘s anthology series, the stakes have escalated to murder.
Just like before, the action involves two high school girls: risk-averse, straight A student Megan Landry (Sadie Stanley) and Isabella LaRue (Lexi Underwood), the wealthy daughter of diplomats. The latter girl is essentially an exchange student who comes to stay with Megan and her family – mom Debbie (KaDee Strickland) and younger sister Lily (Jenna Lamb) – for a year in the small Pacific North West tourist town of Chatam.
The earliest of the three timelines is July 1999, when Isabella first arrives on the eve of Ocean Bloom Festival. Almost immediately the girls get off on the wrong foot. Megan has to relinquish her incredibly cool Air Stream camper for the new girl, and Isabella arrives with expensive welcome gifts, which makes poor, proud Megan bristle. Isabella takes every opportunity to talk about her worldly travels and how she is looking forward to spending time in a small town, which she doesn’t realize sounds both condescending and a little disingenuous.
While the color scheme for July 99 is warm yellows and oranges, the Christmas-set Winter 1999 time period is bathed in cool blues and greys. The friendship that eventually developed over the Summer has blossomed into a “ride or die” sisterhood, though there’s tension and distrust brewing over a sex tape featuring one of the girls and Luke (Griffin Gluck), a local boy who is currently dating Megan, but dated Isabella back in summer.
Luke also happens to be the son of the most powerful man in town, Steve Chambers (Paul Adelstein), who regularly berates Luke and his older brother Brent (Braeden De La Garza) about the importance of family, appearances, and reputation above all else. The fact that both girls are involved with Luke while Debbie is Steve’s employee (and – in the Winter scenes – his girlfriend) makes everything more complicated.
The final timeline, lit in sickly greens, is set six months later in Summer 2000 when a body is pulled from the lake. The identity of the corpse isn’t revealed until the closing moments of the premiere and subsequent episodes delve into the fracturing relationships between the remaining characters as they come under suspicion by Sheriff Myers (Sean Blakemore). He’s particularly interested in Megan, who has shifted from a goodie two-shoe to a hard-edged hacker with slicked back hair and a hard drive full of secrets.
One of the joys of Cruel Summer is parsing through the show’s multi-tiered chronology in search of clues. Is amateur videographer Jeff (Nile Bullock) hiding something in his camcorder footage (regularly seen at parties)? Why does Brent’s girlfriend, Parker (Lisa Yamada) put up with his nonsense when she seems so cool? Whose face is seen on the sex tape that is publicly displayed at the Chambers Christmas party? Is the crazy, gun-toting neighbour up at the cottage involved? And what to make of the fleeting mentions of Isabella’s troubled past in St. Barts the previous year with her MIA best friend Lisa?
The acting is consistently good, particularly Stanley and Underwood, who have great chemistry together. It’s particularly fascinating to watch the girls interact in the Summer 99 timeline when Isabella is desperate to win Megan over, and then contrast that to their combative scenes in Winter 99 when Isabella becomes the target of malicious small town gossip and loses Megan’s unwavering support.
For audiences of a certain age, the show’s extremely specific time period will evoke plenty of nostalgia. The rudimentary computer font that types out the dates at the start of each episode, as well as floppy discs, a reference to Princess Diana’s memorial, and the fear about Y2K are all extremely on-brand details for 1999. And that’s before the turn of the century soundtrack is factored in.
Just like how Yellowjackets leaned into its 90s anthems, Cruel Summer isn’t afraid to set the mood with an iconic needle drop – some good (Sugar Ray’s “Every Morning”!), some…not (Smash Mouth’s “All Star”). It’s all in service to helping to ground the Y2K mystery in time.
The Bottom line: while season two of Cruel Summer doesn’t quite match the same level of gonzo twists as S01, the drama between Megan and Isabella is always compelling and the narrative frequently ventures into unanticipated territory, particularly in the build up to the murderous New Year’s party.
For fans of mysteries and YA, Cruel Summer is your new obsession.
“Cruel Summer” Season 2 premieres on June 5, 2023.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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