It’s a little ridiculous to say that Alice Maio Mackay has matured at the ripe old age of 21, but the prolific Aussie filmmaker’s latest, The Serpent’s Skin (2025), differs from her other films. The bold colour scheme, elliptical editing, overlaid imagery, and general punk rock attitude (particularly her pro-trans rhetoric) are still in evidence, but the narrative moves at a more deliberate pace and the characters have time to breathe between set pieces.
The Serpent’s Skin is a world filled with supernatural entities. Chief among them is protagonist Anna (Alexandra McVicker), a trans girl who escapes from her unsupportive parents’ house to move to the big city and live with her older sister, Dakota (Charlotte Chimes).
Almost immediately, Anna meets a dark-haired tattooist named Gen (Avalon Fast), who is drawn to her. The two quickly realize that they share powerful abilities, including the ability to “push” people, which ranges from manipulating their mental faculties to causing them to bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose. Think the teen feminism & sorcery of The Craft meets the bloody telepathy of Scanners.
Obviously, the film needs a villain, but unlike Mackay’s other texts, the antagonist of the movie is more insidious than an intolerant jerk or a shitty dude. In fact, for nearly half of the runtime, it’s unclear who or what the threat is because the most prominent male character, Danny (Jordan Dulieu), seems like a pretty decent guy. Despite hooking up with Anna on her first night in the big city, he has no jealousy issues when she awkwardly confesses that she’s with Gen now.
It’s a little messy, but considering these are early twenty-something characters, it’s expected.
Mackay and co-writer Benjamin Pahl Robinson give us time to settle in and get to know the characters before the action ramps up. Sure, there’s a predatory thief, Switch (Patty Glavieux), prowling about, but he’s more of a test subject for Anna to learn how to hone and control her powers.
When other people, including several teens, begin showing signs of dementia or lacking all personality, however, it’s clear that Anna and Gen have to step in to help. And if the last act feels slightly rushed and a bit undercooked, it’s forgivable because by this time we’ve sufficiently invested in the girls’ relationship and intrigued by the rules of this world.
It doesn’t hurt that McVicker and Fast have good chemistry. Anna is introduced in a bad place (she’s a cutter, so C/W for self-harm right off the top), but once she moves in with Dakota and is allowed to live how she wants, even her sister notices that Anna has “blossomed.” Anna is empathetic, but she’s also determined and loyal when it comes to her friends.
These qualities are balanced nicely by Gen, whose wit is a little bit dry and whose perspective is a little more world-weary. Mackay and Pahl Robinson deliberately avoid naming the pair “witches”, though the insinuation – not unlike a certain witchy teen film of the 90s – is that there is a strong female component to their powers.
There’s also an open lament about the generations of information and tradition that have been lost due to fear and persecution (this reads both feminist and queer). It’s not the focal point of the film, but the idea of a current generation of women forced to discover how to make their way through the world (without mentorship or a road map) echoes throughout the text.
But The Serpent’s Skin isn’t a dreary drama by any means. Mackay brings back her Carnage for Christmas editor, Vera Drew (who helmed the enormously entertaining trans Batman parody, The People’s Joker), to keep the film moving at a brisk pace, as well as reinforce the empathic connection between the girls’ romance and the villain’s cruising behaviour. In one of the film’s stand-out sequences, Drew cross-cuts between Anna and Gen’s lovemaking and a sexualized attack, symbolically linking them but easily distinguishing them using colored filters (golden amber for the attack; emerald blue for Gen and Anna). It’s hot, unexpected, and – despite not being particularly graphic – the sex is sustained in a way that the majority of contemporary films shy away from.
Shout-out also to special effects make-up artist Dom Keeley for the titular serpentine imagery, which looks appropriately scaly and great. Some of the close-up work on the villain is too reminiscent of the vampires on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, though Mackay enthusiasts may understandably also feel it’s a callback to the vampire make-up of Mackay’s breakthrough 2021 film, So Vam (which was itself indebted to Buffy).
As someone who has always admired Mackay’s punk rock aesthetic while occasionally lamenting the thin characterizations and speedy plotting of her early films, The Serpent’s Skin feels like a solid step in the right direction. The characters are still relatable, but thanks to the measured pacing of the narrative, they also have room to breathe and interact outside of the genre-oriented elements. The result is a film with endearing characters, an intriguing mythological hook, and a healthy dose of sex and violence.
It’s another solid entry in Mackay’s rapidly expanding filmography.
Dark Star Pictures releases The Serpent’s Skin in select theaters starting March 27 before releasing on Digital on April 21, 2026.
