Madness With a Painted Smile

Read Time:6 Minute, 12 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Helloween
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Genre: Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 20m
Director(s): Phil Claydon
Writer(s): Phil Claydon
Cast: Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, Michael Paré, Ronan Summers, Caroline Wilde, Megan Marszal, Samantha Loxley, Malcolm Modele
Where to Watch: on UK digital September 29, 2025, from Miracle Media and Blu-ray release October 13 from 101 Films

RAVING REVIEW: HELLOWEEN sets itself a tricky target: bottle the collective anxiety of the modern-day clown craze and spin it into a narrative with a darker, razor-edge. Rather than treating it as random, the film imagines a conductor behind the madness—a killer whose carnival persona becomes a recruiting poster for rage, revenge, and anarchic spectacle. That premise is the film’s core. It’s topical without being trapped in the news cycle, and it lets the story grapple with the way fear travels: faster than facts, stickier than reason, and dangerously easy to weaponize. Even before the first real stab of violence, the movie treats rumor like an accelerant—and then lights the match.

Phil Claydon leans into momentum over mystery. Once the idea lands that the clown attacks might be more than copycats, the film moves in clean, purposeful lines: a psychiatrist trying to understand the pathology, a reporter chasing the pattern, and a charismatic inmate whose ideology feels engineered to spread. The structure is classical pursuit cinema—clues, setbacks, and a deadline named October 31—yet the texture is modern: text threads, surveillance feeds, and crowd clips that blur what’s staged and what’s contagious. The result is a leaner, punchier experience than the premise might suggest.

Performance-wise, Ronan Summers gives the killer a disquieting cadence—less a boogeyman than a sermonizer who understands the stagecraft of evil. The tics, the poise, the calculated showmanship sell the notion that this figure could mint copycats by the dozen. Across from him, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott’s Dr. Ellen Marks is the film’s conscience and spine. She plays the role of a clinician who never stops seeing a human being across the table, even when every instinct screams to look away. It’s not a “purely cerebral” turn—there’s grit and fear and weariness in how she moves through the story—but the character’s clarity under pressure grounds the film’s escalation. Michael Paré, as the journalist counterpart, brings a steady, lived-in energy; he’s most effective when the character shifts from observer to participant, forced to test whether his own line between telling the story and amplifying the panic actually exists.

The iconography—whistle, greasepaint, simple silhouette—turns the villain into something anyone can copy. That’s not new to horror, but the movie frames it as a feedback loop: the more people fear, the more power it acquires, and the more eager the disaffected are to wear it. Thematically, that’s rich, and the film draws a sharp line between performance and belief; the killer knows he’s staging a show, but his followers need the show to be real. The tension between those two truths gives the final movement an extra charge.

The film occasionally flattens its world outside the main pursuit. We’re told of nationwide chaos, yet the camera mostly hugs a narrow corridor of action. That choice keeps the budget on screen and the plot focused, but it also shrinks the sense of scale the premise promises. A handful of quick-cut glimpses of wider fallout, or even a single sequence that tracks the movement’s spread beyond the protagonists’ world, would have deepened the dread and paid off the idea of a “contagion” more completely. Similarly, for a story built around a homicidal movement, the set-pieces sometimes feel too tidy. The kills are staged with snap and clarity, but a couple more sequences that push into messy, chaotic territory—with sound and motion that feel barely contained—would have raised the intensity ceiling.

Where the film succeeds most is in refusing to treat fear as static. It understands that horror which lives in public spaces—streets, feeds, households—mutates. A scene that begins as a confrontation can end as a recruitment pitch. A narrow escape can immediately become content for the movement to circulate. The movie rarely belabors that point; it simply demonstrates it repeatedly, allowing the audience to feel the uneasy collapse between the private and the public. That choice is more unsettling than any single “gotcha” scare.

If this all sounds like measured praise for a small, scrappy shocker, that’s by design. HELLOWEEN isn’t here to reinvent the wheel; it wants to be the wheel that keeps turning until it runs over you. It does that with conviction. The core performances give it a pulse, the premise gives it a brain, and the pacing gives it legs. I wanted a wider canvas and a meaner edge, and there are moments where it flirts with both without fully committing. But the movie’s best ideas linger—the mask-as-brand, the sermon as recruitment tool, the way a single symbol can colonize a night we pretend belongs to harmless fun. That’s the silver it drives under your skin.

Read the room, and this lands as a solid seasonal watch with a few provocative thoughts tucked between the jolts. It’s not chasing the crown from the titans it nods toward; it’s staking out a lane of its own, one that’s louder about contagion than carnage and more interested in the story of how a monster scales. As a Halloween-night stream, it works. As a comment on the supply chain of fear, it’s sharper than expected. And as a springboard for a continuing mythos, it does enough to make you wonder what happens the next time the mask shows up on your street. A good-not-great chiller with a compelling central idea, anchored by committed performances, that earns its place in the seasonal rotation and hints at something larger in the shadows.

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[photo courtesy of MIRACLE MEDIA, 101 FILMS]

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