A capsule survey of February 20’s most distinctive theatrical releases
Five New Films Opening This Week: From Medieval Horror to Japanese Kabuki
The theatrical landscape on any given Friday is a useful barometer of where cinema’s many sub-genres are pushing. This week’s slate of new releases includes a medieval British psychological thriller, an epic Japanese kabuki drama, a Scandinavian coming-of-age survival story, a quiet British marital drama, and a zombie horror riff on teen angst. Reviewer Todd Jorgenson at Cinemalogue assessed all five, and the results paint a picture of an industry willing to take formal risks even when execution falls short of ambition.
The Dreadful
Director Natasha Kermani’s gothic medieval piece stars Sophie Turner as a young woman living under the control of her domineering mother-in-law, played by Marcia Gay Harden, who begins experiencing hallucinations involving a mysterious man played by Kit Harington. The film draws on British gothic legend and reportedly features some genuinely haunting imagery, but Jorgenson found the screenplay strained at feature length — too emotionally muted to generate meaningful tension from its coming-of-age empowerment framework. Rated R, 94 minutes.
The creative pedigree here is noteworthy: Kermani, whose previous work includes Abraham’s Boys, is a filmmaker whose atmospheric instincts are not in question. The gap, as is common in this kind of film, appears to lie in translating those instincts into a screenplay with enough narrative propulsion. Gothic horror as a genre depends on sustained psychological pressure, and thin plotting can dissipate that pressure quickly.
Kokuho
The most ambitious film of the week by any measure, this epic Japanese drama directed by Sang-il Lee clocks in at 174 minutes and follows a gangster’s son sent to apprentice under a kabuki master in 1964. The story spans decades, tracking the friendship and rivalry between the apprentice (Ryo Yoshizawa) and the master’s son (Ryusei Yokohama) both on and off stage. Jorgenson found it deliberately paced but visually striking and emotionally intense, with the two leads balancing the inherent theatricality of their roles with genuine depth.
Kabuki — one of Japan’s most formally demanding and historically significant performance arts — provides a subject matter rich enough to sustain epic treatment. Japan Guide’s introduction to kabuki offers useful context for Western audiences unfamiliar with the tradition’s conventions and its relationship to masculine identity and artistic lineage, both of which appear central to Kokuho‘s thematic concerns. For screenwriters, long-form epic drama set in a specific cultural tradition represents one of the more challenging structural undertakings: the film must justify its length through earned emotional accumulation rather than episodic incident.
Last Ride
Set in 1982 wintry Scandinavia and written and directed by Cinque Lee (brother of Spike Lee), this coming-of-age thriller involves three rebellious adolescent boys trapped midway up a mountain when their after-hours gondola stalls. With weather closing in and the one adult present incapacitated, the film evolves into what Jorgenson describes as a contemplative study of friendship, mortality, and childhood innocence. The survival premise is there, but the screenplay opts for philosophical reflection over genre mechanics. Jorgenson found it more slight than substantial. Not rated, 97 minutes.
Midwinter Break
A Scottish couple — Gerry (Ciaran Hinds) and Stella (Lesley Manville) — vacation in Amsterdam to test whether there is anything left between them. The setup is deliberately low-stakes and emotionally honest, and both lead performances are praised as richly textured by Jorgenson. The screenplay by its nature requires its drama to emerge from the accumulation of small recognitions and quiet disappointments, which is a genuinely difficult thing to pull off. Jorgenson found the film thoughtful but forgettable — a film that earns its characters’ ordinariness at the cost of dramatic investment. Rated PG-13, 90 minutes. Focus Features, which is distributing the film in the US, has developed a notable track record with this kind of measured British drama.
This Is Not a Test
The week’s most genre-forward entry imagines The Breakfast Club during a zombie apocalypse, set around the Y2K period, with a group of small-town students retreating to their school gymnasium. The film wants to be both a kinetic horror exercise and a tender coming-of-age story about teenagers escaping troubled pasts. Jorgenson found the ambition admirable and the execution uneven — the visual style overemphasizes the gore at the expense of character development. Rated R, 102 minutes.
Taken together, this week’s releases illustrate one of the perennial tensions in screenplay development: the question of what a film is actually about versus what it appears to be about generically. Kokuho succeeds, by Jorgenson’s account, because its genre framework and its human concerns are genuinely integrated. The others, to varying degrees, let one pull away from the other. Film Independent’s editorial blog frequently addresses exactly this challenge for working and emerging screenwriters. The gap between premise and execution is not always fixable in the edit. It usually lives, and dies, on the page.
