Weekly visions - week 30, 2026

リング0 バースデイ / Ring 0: Birthday, directed by Norio Tsuruta, written by Hiroshi Takahashi, based on Kōji Suzuki’s short story Lemon Heart, Japan, 2000 - ⭐⭐⭐

Last week’s Sadako made me curious about the Ringu sequels I haven’t seen yet, plus there is a French boxset coming out that’s a bit less expensive than its Arrow counterpart, and I wanted to check whether - completionism aside - it would feel like a waste of money.

As the numeral indicates, this is not really a sequel - rather, a prequel to the cursed video era, which means that we shouldn’t really worry about whether it fits in the Ring 2-Nakata or in the Raisen-Suzuki continuity.
Sadako is alive and well, or at least as well as a young woman with her troubled family story can be. Very shy, she tries to fit into society by joining a theatre group. There, her shyness attracts the reciprocated attentions of the young sound technician, and the unwelcome proximity of the older director.
But the other members of the troupe start dreaming about a well, the lead actress dies, jealousies and rivalries ensue; everything would be already complicated for Sadako even without the inevitable duo of journalists who are investigating her past (the reporter is Kumiko Asō, who’ll star in Pulse a year later).

We know of course what Sadako’s fate will be, but the way it happens is a third act of weird character decisions and an unexpected backstory, finally giving a bit of horror substance to what is otherwise mostly a drama.
Not fully satisfying, but not a bad film either.

Saw X, directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger, US, 2023 - ⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐)

Everyone complained about the lack of Tobin Bell in Spiral, so here’s the course-correction, giving John Kramer the most screen time ever in a Saw film.
Jigsaw looks old and frail (but quite in good shape, considering the lead actor was 81), although this is a midquel happening somewhere between Saw and Saw III.

You might have missed this detail - after all it was mentioned only in every single sequel - but John Kramer was diagnosed with brain cancer.
It took me watching ten films twice to realise that the brain tumour is the real protagonist of this saga: it’s the reason Jigsaw has nothing to lose, it’s the pretext to find people to ‘play games with’, but I get it now, it’s the tumour that has transformed a kind engineer into a bloodthirsty serial killer ready to off you because you haven’t quit smoking.
Anyway.

He really doesn’t want to die, so he finds a dodgy Norwegian experimental cure, he goes to Mexico City to try it, he pays a lot of money, he undergoes surgery, then he realises he’s been scammed, and this time it really is personal. Even more than the time someone sold a motorbike with faulty brakes to his nephew.

The good: it’s pleasant to spend some time with Tobin Bell, and for maybe an hour, the film is just a drama, and we are sorry for him (except for a gory ‘daydreaming’ sequence, clearly added so that people could have something to be horrified about early on). We also get original and favourite disciple Amanda back, given the chance to show a different side of her character. And, the last scene is a nice reversal of the usual way Saw films end. Too bad that this is the closing scene for the movies, not the end of the chronological story.

The bad: first and foremost, Shawnee Smith’s wig/haircut is just horrible and distracting. This being a prequel, we miss the usual non-linear three-parted Saw sequel structure of prequel plot/trap plot/story plot + twist: the story part is all at the beginning, the trap plot is the second half. The twist - quite a generous word in this case - is weak weak weak.

The ugly: no character featured in a Saw film has ever been a nice person. And it’s true that for nine films we have seen, mostly, US characters being bad and being punished. But there’s something that feels xenophobic in this instalment, whether it’s the algid Norwegian doctor (Norse actress Synnøve Macody Lund, reminding me a bit of Rebecca Ferguson) or her untrustworthy Mexican aides. I suppose screenwriters Stolberg and Goldfinger (returning for the third consecutive instalment) and director Greutert (back from episodes VI and 3D) wanted to explore a new environment, and move away from social commentary after the failure of the requel. But still.

Game Over.
This is the end of the rewatch/ordeal for me and the end of the road for John Kramer. Saw, now a synonym for the torture porn subgenre, has evolved from a small independent horror, to an intriguing trilogy, to a silly soap opera, capped by three post-Elevated Horror attempts at bringing gore back to our screens.
Kramer himself hasn’t lived long enough to see his already twisted ‘philosophy’ bent further to justify personal gain and vendettas, ending up killing pretty much everyone he’s ever been in touch with. Not a great legacy.

Not counting Spiral, we’re left, I believe, with a single significant character on the board. I expect him to be the narrative foothold for the revival of the franchise, announced by Blumhouse with the complicity of original co-creator James Wan, who promised to bring it back to its origins.
We’ll see what game the good doctor wants to play.

Les pistolets en plastique / Plastic Guns, directed by Jean-Christophe Meurisse, co-written with Amélie Philippe, France, 2024 - ⭐⭐½

Sometimes it feels good to pick a random film from Sooner. Being less aware of non-English-language movies, the chance that a title unknown to me is worth the time is much higher.

In this case, I didn’t know the film, the director, any of the actors. The title itself doesn’t give away much. The platform said it’s a comedy.

First scene: while conducting an autopsy, two coroners (not sure if it is the right term here) chat about true-crime documentaries on Netflix and about a legendary, infallible police profiler.
Second scene: the aforementioned police profiler, while waiting to board a flight to Argentina with his family, identifies a guy as Paul Bernardin, a man on the run after allegedly killing his wife and children.
Third scene: two amateur detectives and true-crime enthusiasts embark on their own investigation on the Bernardin case.

At some point, these vaguely related strands more or less coalesce into a full picture. Many characters come and go in the space of a single scene, providing a bit of context or a small development. Some sequences are hilarious (such as the background gags in the Danish police station, the communication issues between the Danish police and the French ones), and some turn to unexpected violence and gore (a payoff for the initial commentary about Netflix).

This is really a strange beast, a bit baffling for the casual viewer, maybe slightly less so for the French audience, who will have recognised the similarities with the unsolved affair Dupont de Ligonnès, itself the subject of a Netflix production (as far as I can tell, the poster of the film is an age-progressed picture of the actual suspect from the real-life case).
Despite the funny moments, I found it enjoyed its own bad taste a bit too much.

Still, it left me curious about Meurisse’s previous work. For the record, I started his previous film Oranges Sanguines, where the imbalance between the ingredients felt too much to digest, revelling too much in grotesque situations and despair. At a certain point I told myself I would stop watching if a certain event happened; it did, and I stopped.

Hokum, written and directed by Damian McCarthy, Ireland, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐

A few months ago I complained that McCarthy’s new film didn’t have a Belgian theatrical release date, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it was out this week, a sorbet between two Holland/Zendaya/Bernthal main courses.
I was happy to be able to watch the film on a Saturday afternoon, together with another half-dozen people scattered around the smallest room of downtown Brussels’ biggest multiplex.

It’s easy to start seeing the patterns in the author’s work: a few characters, murdered women, an isolated, multi-floor space, haunted objects, inanimate simulacra of living beings that seem to have their own will anyway.
But the budget is higher, so the environment, the cast, the effects get bigger.

I had the impression that this expanded scale made the film slightly unfocused: the inner demons of the lead character - rude American writer Ohm (Adam Scott), travelling to rural Ireland to visit the hotel where his parents spent their honeymoon, a happy place where to spread their ashes - didn’t seem to fully amalgamate with the scary forces from the local folklore.

Should they? Not necessarily. It’s perfectly possible that I missed something that will be clearer on a second watch.
But there are a few aspects in the screenplay that could have been tightened, I believe (not going into details to avoid spoilers).

McCarthy’s previous films had a few (some of which memorable) jump scares, but the ones in Hokum felt more frequent, more noisy, more… James Wan-y. So it made sense to find out that the score was composed by Joseph Bishara, author of all the Conjurings and Insidiouses soundtracks, and lollipop demon himself.

I liked this film, but I wanted to love it. And at some point I hoped it would include the origin story for the cursed bell from Oddity.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, directed by Emma Tammi, written by Scott Cawthon, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐

I feel I’m being a bit generous with this one.

Absolutely nothing makes sense in the plot, where we find out that the animatronic-filled pizza parlour/theme park from the first film was actually a remake of a different bigger and scarier and more spectacular place, featuring an indoor river and a really scary-looking mechanical character, called The Marionette (who bears quite a resemblance to our Saw friend Billy). Something horrible went wrong in that place twenty years before, so it was shut down and left untouched, a few miles from the town but completely forgotten.
That’s until McKenna Grace and her crew of paranormal vloggers enter the place and disturb its ghosts, with the help of security guard Mike (not Josh Hutcherson’s security guard Mike! Just another guy with the same job and the same name).
Ihen our heroes from the first film (Hutcherson, younger sister Piper Rubio and troubled not-girlfriend Elizabeth Lail) also discover the same place, for completely unrelated and convoluted reasons, and all plot breaks loose.

The creator of the video game series these films adapt, already credited as a co-writer in the first film, was now left alone to pen the script, and that explains some absurdities that would go completely unnoticed while playing, but become absolutely relevant in a medium where the only goal is to tell a story.

I don’t remember whether it was used much in the marketing campaign, but I suppose the biggest selling point of this film for non-gamers that weren’t discouraged by the first one was reuniting in the cast list Stu Macher and Billy Loomis from Scream. I guess casting Skeet Ulrich, in the intentions of the production, should have felt like adding Laurence Fishburne to the cast of John Wick 2.
In practice, he and Matthew Lillard are both barely present and never share the screen. Furthermore, his acting is really unnatural and distracting, so much so that I thought he was deliberately playing someone with something to hide. But, no.
Ulrich’s presence is not the only nod to Craven’s film, by the way: one specific scene is basically lifted from one of Ghostface’s murders (bar the director wearing a striped jumper)

Wayne ‘Newman’ Knight appears in his usual funnily obnoxious role. His presence and the scary Marionette are what elevates this second chapter a tiny bit above its predecessor.
I’d like to see director Tammi break out from this franchise, and show what she can do with a proper script. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t even try to have a proper ending, so I’m afraid my wish will stay unfulfilled for a while.