Lin at the Cinema - October 2026 (Part 1)
Ghost stories, fascinating box office flops, and powerful documentaries - I’ve already seen a LOT of movies already in October and their are still some doozies yet to come, so I think I’m going to have to split this one in twain.
Since it’s October, let’s kick things off with something seasonally appropriate…
Infirmary
Well, I hate to start with such a dud but God Almighty I hated this movie.
The feature debut of Nicolas Pineda, Infirmary is a found footage horror film told through security camera and bodycam footage, following a security guard’s first shift at a closed psychiatric hospital. Now, I’m a total sucker for found footage. I even have a Blair Witch tattoo! When done with intention and talent, I genuinely believe the subgenre has the potential to terrify more than any other (i.e. The Blair Witch Project, [REC], The Outwaters, and even segments of recent hit Backrooms). Unfortunately, Infirmary is nothing like that. Nothing of the sort.
The sheer lack of sensible horror filmmaking here is genuinely astounding. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to whether a shot is presented from the bodycam perspective or the security camera perspective, and it will even cut between the two during the same sequence, annihilating any tension built by the viewer being forced to stare unblinking down a darkened corridor. It’s this kind of unmotivated, thoughtless filmmaking that can ruin a movie for me and yet another example that how and why something is shown is far more important than what is shown. Presentation is everything, and the presentation of this film is detrimental to its intended experience.
Not that what is shown is all that interesting either. It’s an excruciatingly boring, aimless plot that finally gets interesting for about 30 seconds in the last 5% before shitting the bed again with a dumbass ending. The characters are absolutely insufferable, the performances are unconvincing, the writing is awful, it seemingly tries to be funny at times and fails miserably. There is simply nothing here that works. At the very least, there is some unintentional awkwardness in the first half hour that was somewhat funny to me, and the terrible excuses for conflict to happen were somewhat entertaining in the point-and-laugh way. For the most part, though, I had a bad time watching this bad movie.
Infirmary is currently available to stream on Shudder. I do not recommend you do so.
2/10
Digger
Or, “That new Tom Cruise movie that’s tanking at the box office”
I’ll tread lightly here as far as a plot synopsis goes, as the marketing has been very careful to keep certain elements of the story under wraps: Cruise, in some pretty excellent old-age prosthetics, plays oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, one of whose oil rigs malfunctions causing an environmental catastrophe. Beyond that, you’ll have to see for yourself.
This critically divisive film is on track to be an enormous financial failure for Warner Bros. and I can’t say I’m surprised. It was quite a bold move to spend 120+ million dollars on something with so little mainstream appeal. This is an auteur project through and through, and the marketing promises something the film really is not. What Digger undeniably is is unique. And I will always be there opening weekend to support a unique film.
I actually haven’t seen any of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s films other than Birdman, which I loved, so I really had no idea what to expect here. There is more Birdman here than meets the eye. In terms of its visual language, Digger is eye candy. The artifice-laden sets are gorgeously intricate and expressively framed, the camerawork is fluid and precise, the color palette is both muted and striking. Some images reminded me of my favorite film of the 2020s so far, Poor Things. The score is really unique and memorable, whimsical with a bubbling undercurrent of danger. From a production standpoint? Masterful.
The performances are also largely great. I’m not sure if the critical reception will dim Tom Cruise’s chances at an Oscar nomination, but if it does happen I think it’s deserved. His facial acting through heavy prosthetics was endlessly entertaining to me, and there’s a much talked about monologue in an amphitheater that has a lot of energy. Riz Ahmed gives easily the best performance of the film; he’s completely unrecognizable and his character’s unraveling is a lot of fun to watch. John Goodman was probably the funniest performance for me as a familiarly decrepit and incompetent POTUS. He also has a preacher who follows him around that got the biggest laughs out of me. I’m sad to say that Sandra Hüller, who has given two of the best performances in recent memory in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest is woefully miscast here. Other than her, though, the fault in the film lies not with the performances.
It’s the story and how it’s told that I’m undecided on. I can’t really say I found this movie boring, which is certainly a positive. At times, it was fairly obnoxious. But for the most part I was entertained and curious to see how Iñárritu would bring it all together. There’s a middle chunk where it feels like there’s no way he possibly can. By the end he kind of maybe pulls it off? For me, it’s all contingent on what exactly he’s trying to say with this film. Some have described it as a satire on satire, and I think that’s fairly apt. It wasn’t really laugh out loud funny to me, but it was consistently amusing, and now that I’m starting to get a grasp on what I think it’s going for thematically, it does feel more profound than it did walking out of the theater.
Sooo I think I liked it? As far as recent big budget auteur films go, it’s no One Battle After Another (the best movie of last year), but it’s nowhere near a Megalopolis (the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life). My advice? See it! I want more risk-taking cinema in the world, and I’m worried about what the disastrous financial failure of Digger may spell for the future of Warner Bros. willingness to fund original, ambitious scripts. Digg or die.
7/10
The History of Concrete
You might be surprised to hear that a documentary titled The History of Concrete is, in fact, not boring, full of life, and one of the best and most profound films of the year. It’s all true.
If you’re unfamiliar with How To With John Wilson, it’s an HBO series where Wilson basically just gets a bunch of bizarre footage in the streets of New York and strings it together with a theme like “How to make small talk.” It’s hard to describe and must be experienced firsthand. There’s a spiritual through-line between his work and the legendary Nathan Fielder’s. Both reveal the utter strangeness of the mundane world around us, finding beauty and humor in it. Fielder also produced How To.
In The History of Concrete, John Wilson struggles to find funding for his next project, a documentary on the history of concrete. He attends a workshop for writing Hallmark movies and decides to try to use the formula to sell this movie. So, like Fellini’s 8 ½ or, in the documentary sphere, William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, this is a film about the making of the film you’re watching. It’s also about so much more than that, and so much more than concrete.
Like the HBO series, tangents abound here. You do learn about the history of concrete, but it’s more about the soul of New York City. I was absolutely gobsmacked by how emotionally resonant this film became in its latter half. Concrete is the central metaphor for impermanence, crumbling infrastructure, the things that surround us in everyday life that we don’t notice because they’re so ubiquitous. Wilson puts the mundane under a microscope and finds an entire ecosystem.
It’s also probably the funniest movie I’ve seen all year. At one point, I laughed so hard I actually got lightheaded. I also cried at the end. It slightly overstays its welcome, but how it wraps up is well worth it.
I cannot stress enough how much I recommend this film. If you see anything from this list, make it this one. The History of Concrete is a legitimately incredible movie and seeing it in a full theater was genuinely a profound life experience. I absolutely loved it.
9/10
Beware Boiúna
Beware Boiúna is a decidedly less profound film.
This is a good ol’ bigass snake in the Amazon movie from director Mike P. Nelson. Nelson is notable to me for his 2021 reboot of Wrong Turn, which was not a great movie but probably did the best it possibly could have with the material. I liked the angle he came at that film with; rather than make a typical gorefest rehashing the tired and offensive trope of the cannibalistic inbred West Virginia backwoods hillbilly, he turned the tables and decided to explore some actual themes about rural life versus urban, and did it fairly successfully in my opinion.
He’s also notable as being the director attached to the upcoming reboot of Saw. Saw is my favorite horror franchise, so there’s a lot riding on it and I felt obligated to watch his newest film as a sort of vetting process. I don’t play when it comes to my beloved Saw.
The setup of Beware Boiúna is actually relatively interesting. We follow a small group of doctors on a humanitarian mission in the Amazon, traveling down the river on a boat and stopping at each village they come to to administer vaccines, treat injuries, etc. Also on the river is another group of Americans on a decidedly less humanitarian mission. There’s no subtlety here, but in a monster movie? Who needs it. The two groups are tied by an unfortunate incident that leaves one boat chasing the other, and before long encountering the serpentine guardian of the jungle, Boiúna.
Sadly, the snake action is not particularly well-shot or choreographed. There’s a lot of close shaky cam, quick cutting, and obscure framing that makes it virtually impossible to get invested in what’s happening on screen. There’s a lot of “wait, what happened in that shot? It seemed important.” There are, however, some reasonably scary shots of Boiúna just staring and waiting. It would add a layer of intelligence to the creature if we weren’t told from minute one and then repeated throughout the film, “She decides who lives and who dies.” That excruciatingly obvious reincorporation leads to an obvious ending one could see coming from a mile away, so the final showdown just feels perfunctory and unsatisfying.
This isn’t the worst movie out there, but it didn’t exactly leave me with a great deal of hope for Mike P. Nelson’s Saw. It’s fine, not particularly well made and doesn’t offer anything new or all that interesting. If there was still a such thing as catching a movie on TV, I’d say that’s the best way to watch it.
4/10
Never After Dark
Sticking with the horror theme, here we have a very atmospheric Japanese ghost story… kind of.
Never After Dark is directed by Dave Boyle, who is originally from Tucson (woo!), studied Japanese at BYU, and seemingly did his mission at a Japanese congregation in Australia. But honestly, if you had told me this film was made by a filmmaker born in Japan, I’d believe you.
Ghost movies tend to not be my thing. I generally find it extremely boring to watch a ghost just fucking with characters it can’t physically hurt. I’m sorry, but I’m not scared by a vicarious haunting. So, I admit, I struggled with the first half of this movie. It looks very nice, the location gives so much life to the film and Boyle makes great use of the space. There’s a recurrent striking image of a hallway that’s nicely framed and eerie. The ghost design is suitably gruesome as well. But the pace was inching along for me and nothing genuinely scary was happening. The ingredients were there, but it wasn’t cookin’ yet.
Well.
I should have had more faith. There’s a point midway through where I think I physically perked up in my chair. Things get super interesting in the second half, and it genuinely turns into something horrifying. II will not spoil anything, but this ghost is not harmless. The narrative takes dark turns and transfigures itself into something really unique, while staying a quintessentially Japanese ghost story.
I really don’t want to give away anything else. I haven’t had a movie win me over this much in its second half in quite a while, and I really want more people to see this and to go in blind. It’s a refreshingly gruesome, narratively ambitious take on the haunted house tale and I really enjoyed it.
8/10
Other Mommy
Other Mommy (in competition for worst title of the year) adapts Josh Malerman’s recent horror novel Incidents Around the House, about a child haunted by an entity that takes the form of her mother. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve been told by friends who have that it’s quite good. Based on the trailer, I expected the movie to be quite bad, a feeling that was reaffirmed when the reviews started coming out and everyone seemed to be hating it.
Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I was still angry at something as low-effort and slapped together as Infirmary, but I actually kind of liked this. It’s not great by any means. A lot of it is fairly laughable, the final act is flat out bad, and I can’t really call it scary. But I do think this movie has a decent amount to offer.
The performances are notably better than the Blumhouse standard, especially the child. I actually thought she did a really good job and I believed her as an actual child rather than a mouthpiece for an adult screenwriter. The parents are also well performed, and Jessica Chastain does a really great job with the dual role.
What sets this apart from other, similar movies for me is how the entity (not calling it Other Mommy) interacts with the film’s universe. I fully expected this to follow the formula where all the crazy fantasy things happening to the child remain unseen to the parents and most of the runtime consists of trying to convince them something supernatural is happening. This takes the complete opposite approach. From the start, the parents can see this entity. Of course, at first they think it’s just a person and not something supernatural, but this doesn’t last long.
Much like Never After Dark, it was so refreshing to see a movie where the entity haunting the characters has real ability to cause harm. The situation feels more urgent, we don’t have to sit through any boring bullshit, and it allows these fantasy horror concepts to feel grounded in something other than the psyche. There’s one death in the film where my jaw literally dropped at what the film was willing to show not just to its audience, but its characters as well.
It all has to come crashing down into a disappointing final act, though. I’m unsurprised to learn the ending of the book was much bleaker and better. It’s unfortunate when a horror movie feels like it can’t end on a miserable note. Horror fans can handle it. This was just made with a more mainstream audience in mind.
It could just be that my expectations were so low, but this was not nearly as bad as everyone is saying it is. I’ve seen some genuine dogshit this year, and Other Mommy is not that. I enjoyed it just fine.
5/10
American Doctor
There’s no sugarcoating it, things are about to get a lot more serious, a lot more sad, and a lot more political.
American Doctor, directed by Poh Si Teng, is a documentary following three American doctors; Mark Perlmutter, Thaer Ahmad, and Feroze Sidwha, all from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, treating patients at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. Not exactly a feel-good film.
I guess I can’t really discuss this film without discussing the genocide in Gaza, though I feel woefully ill-equipped to say anything particularly meaningful. I’ll stick to what the film presents, as it is as morally clear-cut as a geopolitical issue could possibly be, but I will also make it clear that my sympathies lie with Palestine.
American Doctor smartly zeroes in on one aspect of the genocide that should not be controversial at all - blowing up hospitals is, without exception, a crime against humanity and wholly unjustified. This is an emotion-forward documentary, taking us into the heart of an overcrowded, under-equipped hospital in the middle of a war-zone. The film wastes no time laying bare the uncensored horror of the situation; it opens with the filmmaker arguing with Perlmutter over whether or not to film an image on his laptop. Teng says she’ll likely pixelate it, fearing robbing the victims in the photo of their dignity. Perlmutter’s response is sobering, and in my opinion, correct. “This is what my tax dollars did. This is what your tax dollars did. This is what your neighbor’s tax dollars did. It is your responsibility to tell the truth.” He shows us the image. It’s horrible. The decision is made: Teng will not shelter us from the truth, will not hide anything for our comfort.
There is a LOT of distressing imagery in this film of dead and injured children, many shot point blank in the head by IDF soldiers. Ordinarily I would warn those who have difficulty with this kind of subject matter away from the film, but in this case I do believe it’s something we should all be forced to sit with. These children were injured with American-made bombs. This is what our tax dollars did. It’s a damning portrait, not just of Israel, but the entire Western machine that feeds its ability to commit war crimes with impunity.
It feels somewhat tasteless to try to judge this analytically as a film, as its emotional power and raw truth is what’s most important. With some time to reflect, though, there are a couple areas where the film could have done a bit more. Most glaringly is a single scene where Perlmutter (who is Jewish) is confronted on a video panel with the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. “Judaism IS Zionism,” the unseen person claims, to which Perlmutter responds to camera, “and therein lies the issue.” This is really the only time in the film this conflation is touched on, and I frankly think it’s a topic that requires an entire additional documentary to unpack. So, for the film to flag it up once and never touch on it again feels like a missed opportunity, and it almost feels like it would be better with that line cut. I do have concerns about alt-right co-opting of anti-Zionist language in the U.S. and the potential for innocent Jews to pay the price for Israel’s crimes. I just think that’s a huge conversation and one this film didn’t have time for, and maybe would have been better off avoiding altogether.
This is a deeply important film, and what angers me most is that those who most need to watch it and understand what is happening in Gaza will dismiss it out of hand as “terrorist propaganda.” Please see this film and encourage others to see it as well.
Free Palestine.
9/10
V/H/S/MIXTAPE
Ah, the V/H/S series. An annual October hors d’oeuvres tray of found-footage splatter horror now in its ninth installment. The series has belonged to the horror streaming service Shudder since 2021’s V/H/S/94, with the previous two films following an internal theme; 2024’s V/H/S/BEYOND consisted entirely of sci-fi horror shorts, while last year’s (easily the best in the franchise) V/H/S/HALLOWEEN focused in on stories set on Halloween night. The themed trend continues this year with V/H/S/MIXTAPE, in which each segment riffs (pun intended) on the broad concept of sound, more specifically music-based chillers. Like I’ve done in the past when reviewing these films, I think the best way to approach it is to discuss each segment on its own.
Gwar Is…, dir. Flying Lotus
As a general rule of thumb, the wraparound segment is never the highlight of one of these films. Here, the wraparound is somewhat unique in that it’s not really a horror short at all, but just a bunch of disconnected scenes of GWAR doing… GWAR shit. While there are some clever jokes in here, on the whole I found these sequences pretty darn insufferable. I was very excited to see FlyLo coming back to direct another segment for the franchise after his brilliant Ozzy’s Dungeon in V/H/S/99, but this just was not to my taste at all. Lots of intentionally fake looking goop and fluids, which would ordinarily be my thing, but here just feels so juvenile and tiresome. Quite frankly, cutting back to these segments throughout really dragged the overall experience down for me. Not a great start.
Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, dir. Renee Zhan
This segment begins as an 80s/90s children’s show starring singing puppets, and it’s a promising opening. It reminded me very much of Casper Kelly’s Buddy, and incidentally I was delighted later in this segment to see a little cameo from Fun-Size, the ridiculous villain of Kelly’s installment in last year’s V/H/S. Unfortunately this does not end up being a disturbing lost episode of some puppet show on tape, but quickly shifts format to a contemporary setting, in which this show is in the early stages of an animated revival and the footage we’re seeing is for some supplemental material documenting the production. Despite a fun performance from horror legend Barbara Crampton, this segment just felt fairly lethargic and perfunctory. Yes, it’s fun to watch puppets kill people, but that’s really all this segment offers. Apart from a pretty catchy tune, I’ll admit. There’s some fun creative gore, but there was room for a lot more creativity here.
Another Cabin, dir. Flying Lotus
So this is really cool! It’s a wordless stop-motion animation of a boy and his grandmother in their cabin being menaced by a giant monster in the woods. I love the style, there’s some great humor, the music is spectacular, and- oh. It’s just a 3 minute music video interlude. Well, shit. Time to move on I guess
Heartbeat, dir. David Moreau
This is another setup that I found pretty interesting: a married couple with an urban exploring YouTube channel document their exploration of an old soviet bunker and find themselves trapped in a fairly horrifying situation. This is, however, another single-plot-point short, so I won’t reveal what that situation is. There are echoes of something like the Russian Sleep Experiment, and I think the format of this series could have allowed for things to go a lot more off the rails like that ridiculous Creepypasta. Still, it is a terrifying situation these characters find themselves in, and of all the shorts in this anthology this is probably the one I would least like to experience in real life. Solid ending too!
The Music of Mr. Sze, dir. Ernest Dickerson
This one I found pretty amusing, and not entirely in ways I think were intended. A film student moves into an apartment building and becomes obsessed with a violinist on the top floor, who plays strange music late into the night. He decides to make this titular Mr. Sze the subject of his documentary thesis project and finds that the guy is really fuckin’ weird. There were a number of aspects to this segment that I found particularly amusing. Of course I appreciated the focus on classical music, but I’m not sure exactly how familiar the director is with that world. For my favorite example, Mr. Sze (who the landlady mentions in a professional orchestra) is spellbound by the notion that this film student can record his music for future generations to hear, and is so giddy that he asks if they can do so immediately. So, they go up to his apartment, set up the camera… and he starts playing Danse Macabre. I burst out laughing at the opening tritone.
The other aspect of this short I found endlessly entertaining was how shoddy the styling of the characters is. I’ve seen some rough hair on screen the past couple years (synthetic wigs were not meant for high definition), but Mr. Sze’s SERIES of wigs throughout the segment are some of the most egregious by far. Absolutely hilarious. The landlady also looks like she just bought an unauthorized Aunt Gladys costume from Spirit Halloween. I was having the time of my life.
As far as the horror goes, it’s pretty goofy but I liked the Lovecraftian angle to it. I have pretty fond feelings towards this segment overall, even if not all those feelings are what the director intended.
Death Tone, dir. RZA
I actually thought The Music of Mr. Sze was going to be the last segment and was a little disappointed in the crop overall, so when Death Tone started I still had the appetite for one more, hoping for at least one great segment. I’m not sure it quite nailed the mark, but this is easily the best of the bunch. This has a gold mine of a horror concept I wish I’d thought of - a psychopathic pop musician who records the sounds of her murders and uses them as samples in her music. Fittingly, the sound design is the highlight here and there’s a lot of creativity in turning the sounds of a spine being torn from a body into a sick beat. Where the segment falters is in its believability when it comes to character motivations. This has to be one of the dumbest serial killers ever put on film. It’s never a question of “will she be caught” and more a question of “how has she not been caught yet.” It all builds to a pretty satisfying ending, and overall I think this is far and away the most successful filling of the brief of music-based horror.
Overall, Mixtape is pretty middle of the road V/H/S. The framing story really did bring down the overall experience for me, and none of the segments themselves were as strong as the best the series have to offer (if you’re going to watch any segments, I recommend Amateur Night in V/H/S, Safe Haven in V/H/S/2, Terror in V/H/S/94, Ozzy’s Dungeon and To Hell and Back in V/H/S/99, Stowaway in V/H/S/BEYOND, and the entirety of V/H/S/HALLOWEEN). This series has become an annual October tradition for me for six years now, and I always look forward to it.
Even when it doesn’t quite hit, it’s never a waste of time, and there’s always next year.
6/10
Verity
Now why did I, an avowed Colleen Hoover hater, bother to see Verity?
Why else? I thought it would be funny. And it was! Periodically.
Based on Hoover’s bestselling erotic thriller (?), Verity follows obscure author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), as she is hired by the husband (Josh Hartnett) of immensely popular author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) to ghost-write Verity’s next book after a car accident has left her catatonic. These character names, incidentally, are toned down for Colleen Hoover. As Lowen stays in the Crawford family’s swanky lake house and reads through her notes in preparation of writing in her style, she discovers a seemingly autobiographical manuscript on a hidden flash-drive and, well, secrets come to light.
Quite frankly, the plot is utterly preposterous. It falls apart under the tiniest bit of scrutiny, but the more I think about it the more hilariously contrived it becomes. There is just, from a conceptual level, no universe in which the sequence of events in this movie are remotely possible. And that’s where most of my enjoyment lies. This movie takes itself 100% seriously and earnestly believes what it’s doing is provocative and edgy. It’s more of an R-rated Scooby Doo episode.
The comedic heart of this not-comedy for me is Dakota Johnson. I am endlessly delighted by her complete inability to pretend she cares about the material in movies she’s only doing for a paycheck. Not one frame of her performance feels sincere; she’s bored and over it the entire time, and that makes things a lot more entertaining for me. The decision is also made to have her vaping throughout the entire movie, so intended serious beats are punctuated by her disinterestedly blowing vapor out of her mouth and nose. It. Was. Hilarious.
I honestly don’t have much to say beyond that. Fans of the book seem lukewarm on it, and it really does take a while before things get enjoyably bonkers. As an erotic film, it’s tame as they come. As a thriller, it’s entirely nonsensical. It’s a disposable film I won’t remember a month from now, but I did get a lot of comedic mileage out of Dakota Johnson’s performance and picking the plot to shreds on the way home from the theater.
4/10
Aaaand I’m going to cut it there for the first half of October. Already there’s been some great stuff this month, but oh, I have such sights to show you still. I’ll return, once I’ve seen everything…