Sometimes horror really doesn’t need to be complicated.
Give us a handful of characters we care about, isolate them somewhere they shouldn’t be, introduce something terrifying and let nature take its course. Joshua Giuliano understands this remarkably well with River, his feature directorial debut and a brutally efficient love letter to the kind of slasher filmmaking that once understood simplicity as a virtue rather than a limitation.
There’s grief. There’s a boat. There’s a river. There’s a masked man who wants everybody dead.
What more do you really need?
Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe and Max Mattern play three siblings reunited following the death of their father. Their relationship with him was complicated, to put it mildly, but they’ve agreed to take his ashes down the river where they spent much of their childhood and scatter them together.
It’s already an emotionally uncomfortable journey before their boat runs into trouble.
Then they notice someone watching from the shoreline.
Giuliano doesn’t waste much time explaining the man, and River is considerably better for it. Played with unnerving physicality by Dane DiLiegro, the killer is an imposing, almost elemental presence; less a character requiring mythology than a force that has simply entered their lives and refuses to leave. His mask is vaguely human, which somehow makes it considerably worse, and there’s something deeply unsettling about how little adornment surrounds him.
He doesn’t need a monologue. He doesn’t need a tragic childhood flashback.
He just keeps coming.
In an era where horror franchises can seemingly spend half their running time explaining why their villains behave the way they do, there’s something wonderfully refreshing about River stripping the slasher back to its most primal ingredients. Giuliano has spoken about wanting to reduce the genre to people being hunted by an unstoppable embodiment of death, and that philosophy is visible throughout the film.
It’s essentially what the recent attempts to revive The Strangers should have been: lean, vicious and confident enough to understand that not knowing is usually considerably scarier than knowing.
Not that River rushes immediately into the carnage.
Its opening stretch is surprisingly patient, perhaps a little too patient at times, spending considerable time establishing the fractured dynamic between the siblings and their conflicting feelings towards their father. Some of that dialogue can feel more functional than natural, and there are moments where you’re practically willing Giuliano to unleash the reason everyone bought a Midnight Madness ticket in the first place.
Fortunately, once he does, River absolutely moves.
The initial river setting gives the film an unusual spatial tension. Open water should theoretically suggest freedom, yet Giuliano and cinematographer Nick Matthews make it feel strangely claustrophobic. The characters can see enormous stretches of landscape around them, but there’s nowhere particularly useful to go. The shoreline becomes threatening precisely because they don’t know where their pursuer might appear next.
And visually, River is often gorgeous.
Matthews photographs the surrounding wilderness with a deceptive serenity, framing lush greenery, open water and warm natural light against increasingly grotesque violence. Giuliano has described that contrast between beauty and brutality as a guiding visual principle, and it gives the film a striking personality even when its narrative is consciously drawing from familiar genre traditions.
There are shades of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th and the broader tradition of backwoods survival horror all over River, but Giuliano isn’t pretending otherwise.
This is very deliberately a slasher made by someone who clearly loves slashers, and the fun comes from watching how he assembles those familiar pieces.
Once the blood starts flowing, the film becomes wonderfully nasty. Giuliano has no particular interest in protecting the audience from the impact of what’s happening. Bodies are battered, stabbed and generally treated with the disrespect genre devotees will undoubtedly appreciate. The violence feels tactile rather than overly polished, with the camera often lingering just long enough to make you squirm before moving on to the next nightmare.
Levy and Rothe are, unsurprisingly, ideal performers to have trapped in this particular nightmare.
Both have already proven themselves enormously capable genre leads through Evil Dead and Happy Death Day, respectively, and River knows exactly what audiences want from that casting. Levy has an especially satisfying arc into full survival mode, bringing the same feral physical commitment that made her horror work so memorable in the first place; there’s a moment where she is filthy, furious and completely exhausted by the killer’s persistence that feels almost designed to elicit cheers.
Rothe brings a different energy, making her character’s vulnerability and imperfections part of what makes her worth rooting for. When the sisters are finally forced to stop sniping at one another and simply survive together, the contrast between Levy and Rothe’s performances becomes one of the film’s most enjoyable strengths. Giuliano deliberately cast the pair knowing both could eventually abandon the personality clashes and go feral together, and that instinct pays off.
Mattern, meanwhile, provides much of the film’s nervous comic relief, often feeling like the person least naturally equipped to survive a horror movie. His physical awkwardness and increasingly overwhelmed reactions give River just enough humour to keep things playful without entirely deflating the danger.
Though, admittedly, the film occasionally pushes that playfulness into territory that feels almost surreal.
There are several moments where the logic of the pursuit becomes ridiculous enough that you may find yourself laughing rather than screaming. Whether every one of those laughs is intentional is debatable, but River is ultimately such an ideal crowd movie that it hardly matters. Some of its strangest beats will likely play even better with a packed midnight audience ready to collectively lose their minds.
What matters is that Giuliano knows how to build anticipation.
He frequently allows us to spot danger before the characters do, letting an approaching figure or distant movement sit inside the frame long enough for dread to take hold. The sound design works in tandem with those visuals, understanding that hearing something awful somewhere beyond the frame can often be more effective than immediately showing it.
It’s a very old horror trick. It still works. And that, really, sums up River.
There’s very little about its fundamental construction that genre fans haven’t encountered before. Giuliano isn’t reinventing the slasher. He doesn’t particularly seem interested in doing so. Instead, he’s demonstrating why those mechanics became popular in the first place; a frightening location, a committed cast. a killer you desperately don’t want to see moving towards you, and approximately ninety minutes of increasingly terrible decisions.
Sometimes that’s enough.
With a beautifully nasty visual sensibility, two immensely reliable scream queens at its centre and a villain whose simplicity only makes him more unnerving, River is exactly the type of lean, mean genre exercise horror crowds deserve.
It’s bloody, ridiculous and enormously entertaining – and when the credits begin, don’t immediately rush for the exit.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
River is screening as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, running between September 10th and 20th, 2026. For more information, head to the official site here.
