After surviving the latest Ghostface attack in Woodsboro, sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) move from the small town to bustling New York City.  Fellow survivor sibling pair, Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding) also enroll in the same college as Tara and together they try to put the horrors of their past behind them.  Try as they might to move on, Ghostface has found them once again and puts “the core four” and their new friends in danger. 

Less than a year removed from the end of the theatrical run of Scream (2022), a self-proclaimed “requel” to the iconic 1996 similarly titled Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson collaboration, Matt Bettinelli and Tyler Gillett return to direct Scream VI for Paramount from a script penned by their 2022 team, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick.  With another mix of legacy, returning, and new characters, the ensemble list is quite large giving Ghostface plenty of opportunities to slash away while making the suspect all that much harder to pin down. 

Transplanting the story out of Woodsboro and into The Big Apple was a necessary move to try and grow this series out of its small-town roots and adds a nice change of pace giving Ghostface a near-endless pool of people to attack.  The film opens with Laura (Samara Weaving), a film studies professor running a course on slashers – because of course she is – who is waiting at the bar for her online date to show up.  What follows is a bit of an update on the original opening phone call, her date asking over text if he can call, lost, asking for directions and finally coaxing Laura outside and into an alley where she is quickly dispatched with after a few comments about how she should know better than this.  Scream VI then deploys its first subversion, unmasking the killer, revealing it to be Jason (Tony Revolori), one of her students, who is mad that she graded him a C on his Giallo paper – because of course he wrote about Giallo.  This would have completely disrupted the Scream formula, and for a few moments, audiences find themselves in exciting new territory, only to be returned to form in the next scene. Thankfully, Jason is not long for this world as the real Ghostface has this pale imitation set as his next target.  It is hard to say just where the weak link in this opening comes from, Revolori’s awkward line readings or the clunky dialogue he is given, but it is something that will haunt the film more than Ghostface is ever able to because so many of these exchanges in the bloated 123-minute film are incredibly rigid and the cast all struggle to make it feel natural. 

No one here has a well-written role, but the worst offender is Brown’s Mindy who once again is saddled with explaining the meta franchise.  She is absolutely insufferable here, and that is largely due to Vanderbilt and Busick leaning too far into the cheeky nature of the series making these fourth wall cracking moments not self-aware opportunities for comedy, but cringe-worthy and groan-inducing DOA jokes.  Mindy is constantly making references to the movies – both the fictional Stab franchise and the tropes at large – but it has none of the charm of the original from 1996 or even of last year’s requel.  It is a screeching and over-the-top performance as the writing on the page leaves Brown with little else to try and do but to exaggerate her every action in hopes of garnering up at least a chuckle from the audience.  If she is supposed to be our surrogate in the film, the writing and directing teams clearly have no respect or regard toward those who see their films as they use Mindy to belittle and demean their own fanbase at every chance.  

The main duo of the story are the Carpenter sisters, and while Sam has a little more to do as the one more panicked about Ghostface’s reemergence, neither are exactly well-conceived or motivated roles.  Barrera takes the part and makes it serviceable, but Ortega, unfortunately, drowns in the mundane material and is unable to bring about any charisma or spark that has made her such a fan favorite in her appearances in a handful of some of today’s hottest horror franchises.  The creative team seems a little unsure how to handle Ortega’s rise in popular horror, so they essentially bury her in the bloated narrative in an effort not to retread, but by doing so they handicap one of the more dynamic stars of this new generation of Scream titles. Gooding’s Chad also falls back into the dull and forgettable category here, relying on the same frat boy bravado that is quickly defining his resume. Like Mindy, he survives a brutal stabbing late in the film, but the script does nothing to reckon with the fact that this is twice now he has been attacked. Even within the context of the brother and sister dynamic, they barely seem affected by this trauma despite the clear love for one another that has been established.

The newer faces thankfully fare better and give Scream VI some energy. Tara’s roommate, Quinn (Liana Liberato) is introduced early on as a sex-positive free spirit with a good heart and an understanding that Tara has been through certain traumas in the past. She is friendly with Sam, who often makes eyes at “cute boy” Danny (Josh Segarra) who lives across the way. The last fresh face is Chad’s dopey roommate Ethan (Jack Champion) who is played as the butt of all the jokes and often tacked onto scenes rather than driving them – or even contributing to them – for much of the film. That pattern does change a little when the gang gets separated late in the film and he is on a train with Mindy when Ghostface appears. It is a thrilling sequence, but it gets a little too involved with itself and because Mindy has built such a fraught relationship with the audience and Ethan is such a nothing character, there is no emotional weight and it feels more like a stopping point in the narrative to pad the runtime and artificially up the body count than our introduction to the finale.

As for the legacy characters, Courteney Cox returns as Gale Weathers and Hayden Panettiere as Kirby Reed. The crew seems a little more energized this time around, and the writing team also feels a little more confident in how to handle these characters, too, though Kirby is written to be a bit of a jack of all trades so that the plot can move forward, but also not great at her job so that they can play up some laughs. As Mindy reminds us, legacy characters are no longer protected from harm, and Scream VI finds many of them ending the film a little worse for wear. It is a nice development as it puts everyone on a level playing field, yet Mindy’s warning to the returning requel cast that they, too, are all in danger is not a self-fulfilling prophecy and if this series is to continue – which all signs point to yes – they need to begin getting cycled out as none of them really seem to enjoy or do well in their roles. The root problem, though, comes down to the writing team, and if they were replaced the cast across the board would be able to put in a better performance as, with luck, the script would be a lot more competently written with goals in mind. 

Suspension of disbelief is required given the very nature of watching a film, and even more so when it comes to horror. Bad decisions fuel the drama and the tension of this genre, especially ones that operate in the traditional slasher template. Ones set in the current day also have to contend with the permeance of technology into everyday life. Scream VI touches upon technology with a viral video of Sam lashing out at a passerby who claims that she is the mastermind behind the Ghostface legacy; a conspiracy theory that festers on the Reddit boards in the film. A smarter script would have welcomed and expanded on this notion, but ultimately, the filmmakers wanted to take the easy route and cash in on some cheap thrills. They do so decently enough with some creative chase scenes, but in an effort to increase the stakes, they get a little too drawn out and Ghostface, therefore, becomes unbelievably invincible, even for audiences watching in good faith.  What is worse, is that the people he is terrorizing also gain an incredible amount of resilience and power. Mindy, Chad, and Gale, who all should not have survived their attacks, will instead live on to fight yet another imitation killer in the inevitable next installment where surely we will be ironically lectured about how not everything needs to be a trilogy and made to feel dumb for even bothering to show up to the cinema at all. The three of them each survive multiple major stabbings and then move on to the next sequence as if nothing had happened. The worst offending scene involves Anika (Devyn Nekoda) who, after being brutalized by Ghostface, is still able to crawl across a ladder spanning between two apartment buildings, and while she ultimately does not make the crossing, she should have been dead long before then.

Whereas in their previous effort, this creative quad came up with a fitting tribute and homage to the source material, now that they have tried to make it their own, they have abandoned what made Craven’s work so special. The script is far too heavy-handed in its awareness that it becomes annoying instead of sly, elbowing its audience at each reference like “hey, hey, did you get that? We know this is a movie!” They are too preoccupied with direct name drops of various other films and characters to build up some trust and prove their credentials to the audience, but instead it feels like they are just rattling off references unconnected to the actual story they are supposed to be crafting. With a cast that does their best with the script they have been handed, chase sequences that run a little too long and verge on getting boring, and an absolutely convoluted conclusion that throws character traits and motivations to the wind – an unfortunate staple of the series – Scream VI is a mess of a film that while devotees of the franchise may enjoy it, it offers very little to the more casual fans. The fan service here is not as blatantly obvious as the product placement for Coors Light, but it sets a drop in quality moving forward from the previous installment.