Reviews
‘Rock Springs’ Sundance Review – History is a Monster in Sobering Horror Debut
Just as tension over immigration reaches a boiling point in our country, Two Sentence Horror Stories‘ writer-director Vera Miao‘s sobering feature debut arrives to trace a grim but familiar line between America’s violent past and present. Rock Springs explores over a century’s worth of racial trauma through a Chinese-American family, though the historical horror here is monstrous in more ways than one.
A surreal nightmare introduces Grace (Aria Kim), a young girl still grieving over the loss of her father. Her also grieving mom, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), relocates them along with Grace’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu) to the quaint Wyoming town of Rock Springs for a fresh start. The problem is that Emily, a Westernized adopted Vietnamese woman, isn’t savvy about the Chinese customs that she’d married into and dismisses Nai Nai’s cautions of Ghost Month, a period in which the gates of hell are open. Their arrival awakens something monstrous from the town’s horrific past, and it’s lurking in the woods right behind their new home.
Photo by Rocks Springs LLC.
Miao structures her feature debut into three parts, starting with Grace’s perspective as she silently explores the area, seemingly a beacon for otherworldly horrors. This chapter establishes muted atmospherics and draws heavily from Hereditary in tone and horror mechanics, complete with almost dizzying upside-down shots overhead. The ghost of Emily’s husband lingers in darkened corners, threatening her careful facade barely containing the sorrow she’s been shielding from her remaining family, and it’s only exacerbated by Grace’s strange behavior.
Yet Miao is almost too restrained in this first act, limiting details to recontextualize later with additional perspective shifts. An early scene of Grace eavesdropping on what she presumes to be her mother’s stifled sobs behind closed doors is actually Emily attempting to choke back screams of terror when Rock Springs eventually shifts to her perspective. While the core family unit is fairly threadbare in characterization and background, outside of their shared mourning, the fraught mother/daughter relationship provides the backbone that provides hope in an increasingly bleak endeavor.
That’s because Rock Springs dramatically shifts gears in its middle section, changing tone and pace for a harrowing rewind to the town in 1885. It’s the film’s knockout centerpiece that sees a close-knit community of Chinese mine workers, most of whom have plans to return to their families back home, enjoying a day off, only to fall prey to one devastatingly cruel siege by the town’s white miners. Benedict Wong adds heartbreaking complexity to Ah Tseng, a miner harboring a lot of unspoken pain and trauma, who warns his optimistic nephew (Ricky He) not to give himself so willingly to a hostile country that doesn’t want him. It’s a heavy foreshadowing of the gruesome violence on the immediate horizon.
Cinematographer Heyjin Jun captures the ensuing massacre with unflinching immediacy, injecting the sleepy ghost story with a surprisingly visceral shot of adrenaline. Ah Tseng’s helplessness is as devastating as the slaughter itself, and Miao doesn’t hold back from depicting the gory cruelty, even making sure to note white women’s complicity in racist evils.
Kelly Marie Tran appears in Rock Springs by Vera Miao, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Rocks Springs LLC.
History is indeed a vicious monster, with Miao pulling from the Rock Springs Massacre to craft a Chinese-American ghost story exposing another dark corner of America’s past. The strange fleshy beast teased in glimpses congeals for a full-blown creature feature third act that sounds way more interesting in concept than execution. Not helping is that the creature design isn’t particularly, well, fleshed out, or easy to grasp in intent.
In a film where the ghosts and skeletons in Rock Springs’ closet are never as insidious as the cruelty that birthed them, the finale loses its edge as it rushes toward a superficial though no less poignant tribute to the forgotten.
Rock Springs‘ narrative structure occasionally proves a bit unwieldy, struggling to bridge the underdeveloped personal family drama at the center to the larger, far more effective theme of racial trauma and horror. Miao executes her vision with clear purpose when it comes to the past, but leans too heavily on influences for the present.
Emily’s personal plight to keep her family together ultimately feels like a superficial means of relaying the true horror here, a historical tragedy that should’ve served as a lesson, one that’s painfully still necessary today.
Rock Springs made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Release info TBD.
Reviews
‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review]
Hollywood has been stuck in a trend where a recognizable property — any recognizable property — holds more value than an original idea. This has led to a trend where a slew of acclaimed films have transitioned over to television and become limited series, because why not?
Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.
Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations.
This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.
On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.
Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.
It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film.
Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.
Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.
What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.
This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.
These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when.
Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.
Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.
If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.
The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.
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