The latest movie in the Scream franchise gets a fresh location: sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega) are cohabiting in New York, where Tara is attending university and Sam is helicoptering anxiously, unable to move past the trauma that unfolded in the previous film. The daughter of one of the original killers, Sam is still struggling with her mental health and the guilty realisation that she rather enjoyed dispatching the last batch of aspiring ghost-face murderers. And online haters have tried her and found her guilty of being the real perpetrator in the most recent Woodsboro bloodbath. Meanwhile, Tara is desperate for a normal life, preferably one that doesn’t involve her big sister Tasering her prospective boyfriends in the testicles.
But the backdrop is the only significant thing that has changed in a film that rehashes everything – from the plot points of the previous films to the smirking meta references to horror nut Mindy’s (Jasmin Savoy Brown’s) contextualising second-act monologue. The only notable development is just how rapidly a satirical skewering of genre formulas can become thuddingly formulaic.
