In Review: ‘Scream 7,’ ‘Dreams’

Scream 7
Dir. Kevin Williamson
114 min.

Even Scream 7 seems to realize it’s now part of a moribund franchise. The latest sequel’s opening scene finds a pair of murder tourists (Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph) visiting the house where the climax to the original film took place, when ____ and ____ terrorized Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and her friends.* The house now serves as a themed Airbnb-like getaway for fans of the crimes depicted in that film, its sequels, and the franchise-within-a-franchise Stab movies. The sprawling home is filled with displays marking the location of the crimes that made it famous and Stab movie memorabilia, all of it carefully labeled, most of it behind glass. The return visit might seem relatively clever if Scream (the 2022 Scream that should have been called Scream 5) didn’t already pay the site a return visit. The sequence ends with the house in flames, but if this is intended as a symbolic gesture it’s a futile one. We’re watching a museum display in film form. It’s a taxidermied movie that only has the appearance of being alive.

(* We probably don’t need to retract spoilers for a 30-year-old film but let’s play it safe. The original Scream is pretty great. Check it out if you haven’t seen it. Also, in a Scream-like meta touch, you, too, can now tour the house in real life.)

That Scream 7 doubles back only underscores that impression. Remember those new characters played by Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in the last two Screams? They’re gone because Spyglass Media fired Barrera after she made some social media posts suggesting Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza was immoral. (This has led some to boycott Scream 7. Don’t let the fact that we’re reviewing it discourage you if you’re so inclined.) So the focus again falls on Sidney and a returning Campbell, who sat out the last Scream over salary issues. Scream 7 makes repeated winking references to this, but it otherwise feels off its post-modern game, despite the return of Scream creator Kevin Williamson, who serves as director and co-writer, for the first time since Scream 4. There just isn’t that much meta commentary you can supply for horror franchises this deep into their existence, except that they mostly suck.

Now living in the idyllic small town of Pine Grove, where she runs a coffee shop and gently fields questions about her past, Sidney and her husband Mark (Joel McHale), a police chief, are mostly concerned about their daughter Tatum (Isabel May), who’s started to rebel against their authority. (Their two other kids have been conveniently shuffled off to their grandparents.) But this concern falls by the wayside once Sidney starts receiving spooky calls from a familiar voice. You can probably guess what happens next: “surprise” visits from old friends and the thinning of the teen herd surrounding Tatum.

That Scream 7 barely bothers to give its younger characters a single dimension (the creepy true crime buff, the bubbly theater nerd, etc.) is just one way the series shows its age. It’s far more concerned with the older characters and their various dramas than the future corpses. On that front, Campbell’s solid performance provides a sole bright spot. (It’s kind of a shame that the Scream movies are basically the only time we see her on the big screen these days, when they can afford her.) On the mystery front, it’s not a matter of whether one of the colorful character actors who show up in supporting roles will be the bad guy, but which. When it comes to staging scares, Williamson is competent but no Wes Craven (and even Craven had trouble bringing the sequels to life). In the tradition of the opening scene, let’s bring it all full circle with the question that kicked off this series: Do you like scary movies? If so, there are plenty of other ones you could watch. —Keith Phipps

Scream 7 is in theaters... right now! Boo!

Dreams
Dir. Michel Franco
98 min.

There are two scenes in Michel Franco’s Dreams where the McCarthys, generous patrons of the arts, ask for applause from guests at an opening or get-together and receive it warmly. First, Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain), a glamorous socialite and divorcee, strolls into San Francisco art museum wing named after her father Michael (Marshall Bell), who’s getting acknowledged for supplying an exhibit with work from his private collection. Later, at a dance academy in Mexico City, Michael returns the favor by seeking applause for Jennifer and her brother Jake (Rupert Friend), who are funding the entire operation through the McCarthy Foundation. The reception in both cases is, of course, entirely conditional: If the McCarthys decided, for whatever reason, to yank their support, all the people clapping would not have jobs. The flip side of philanthropy tends to be misanthropy.

That Franco never reveals the source of the McCarthy fortune is the lone mercy he extends to them, but it’s not like Dreams isn’t keen to the power dynamics at play here, often to an embarrassing fault. While Franco is not required to treat any of the McCarthys with affection, he spends much of the story following Jennifer, who never fails to live down to the stereotype of an ultra-rich liberal who’s prepared to abandon her principles at the slightest discomfort. For comparison’s sake, she’s not unlike Siobhan on Succession, the lone female heir to a Fox-like conservative media empire, who rebels against the family by offering her consulting services to its political foes, but isn’t exactly married to her values. Yet there’s a humanity given to Siobhan that Franco cannot bring himself to extend to Jennifer, which would be less of a problem if his gestures toward sadism and satire weren’t such half-measures. 

The one semi-human quality Jennifer possesses is the raw desire that draws her to Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a handsome ballet dancer from Mexico City who’s roughly half her age. They do look great together, though, and Franco isn’t afraid to express their chemistry in frankly erotic terms, especially when their power struggle is manifested physically. Dreams starts with Fernando stumbling out of the shipping container of a semi, where he’s one among many undocumented Mexicans who have risked their lives to get smuggled across the border. After he makes his way to an upscale home in San Francisco and crawls into bed, we’re introduced to Jennifer, the home’s owner, who’s not thrilled to see him there, but sets aside her feelings to slake her desire. Jennifer and Fernando met at the Mexico City academy she runs through her foundation, but he’s a talented enough dancer now to attract interest from a prestigious dance company. It’s just too awkward for her to have him around. 

Aside from a lively stretch toward the end of the film where Jennifer and Fernando wrestle on equal footing, literally as well as figuratively, Dreams is blunt in its intentions and programmatic in its plotting. Jennifer is accustomed to getting what she wants and it’s much easier for her to tuck this secret affair away in Mexico City than have it out in the open in America. Though Fernando is intelligent and knows how to squeeze minor advantages out of his wile and good looks, he’s poor and undocumented, as subject to Jennifer’s largesse as the art museum and the dance academy. Dreams is written in anger, which however righteous it may be, pushes the film down the narrowest lane of inevitability. Franco may not like Jennifer and the type of person she represents, but he could spare a stray thought to how she feels. —Scott Tobias

Dreams opens in limited release today.