The fifth film in the Scream franchise has not been titled 5cream, which is all the proof you need that we live in a cruel, arbitrary universe devoid of meaning or justice. But other than that, this is a pretty snappy addition to the longrunning slasher movie franchise begun by a different movie with the exact same title of Scream, for absolutely no reason that I can discern. It's not even the first quasi-reboot to have come out eleven years after the last entry in the series, and like 2011's Scream 4, AKA Scre4m, never decided that it was too good for numerals.

Anyways, that's old news, so on to the stuff that actually matters: Scream - that's Scream (2022), not Scream (1996), oh good Jesus, I'm just going to call it Scream 5 - is a much better old-fashioned slasher movie than it makes any sense to expect here in the 2020s. I would even call it a better film than the first movie, though it should be noted that I am by absolutely no stretch of the imagination a reliable authority on the Scream franchise. It mostly fits the franchise formula down to the slightest details: indeed, it's something of a "replicate the structure of the first movie" exercise along the model of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And it is aware of this, making that movie perhaps its single most explicit point of reference. This series is of course primarily distinguished by its pop culture commentary, genre deconstruction, and self-referentiality, and in this case, that means lots and lots of jokes about the "requel" trend, its ugly neologism for "movies that try to reboot a series with a years-later sequel that makes a big show of trotting out the old stars of the original in a movie that's mostly trying to lay the ground for a new incarnation of the franchise. And since Star Wars is by almost any imaginable yardstick the most prominent franchise to have played this trick, Scream 5 ends up nodding much more to those films than to any which come from its own genre. Which doesn't sit right with me, to be honest; I've always thought that self-aware metahumor is the weakest recurring element of this series (maybe with the exception of Scream 2), and I think it's a bigger problem here than usual, simply because it doesn't really feel like it has taken aim well. "Requels" and outraged, overentitled fans, the film's two big targets, simply aren't really "things" in horror, not enough to make it feel like this is looking inward the way its four predecessors have. It's sort of more like generic cultural commentary wrapped inside the Scream name, rather than an inquisitive or interrogative look at itself. At the very least, this certainly isn't a strength.

But it's also the single biggest, maybe even the only actual problem I can come up with: taken as both a neo-slasher on its own terms, and a long-delayed sequel (one that scrupulously includes narrative elements from every previous entry, even if it clearly longs to be thought of in most ways as a direct follow-up to the '96 original), Scream 5 is remarkably, I'd even say surprisingly satisfying. Judged strictly as a slasher, it's the rarest thing in 21st Century American horror: extremely brutal, even violent without ever lapsing into nihilism, with a pretty great tendency to trigger an "oh, that's horrible" response right alongside some of the most perfect "ew, that's so gross, haha!" sequences I've seen in many a year of R-rated horror pictures. At least those which get theatrical release.

The story, which I probably ought to have gotten to by now, starts us in a familiar spot: a young woman gets a call on a phone, where a sarcastic, threatening male voice (provided, as ever, by Roger Jackson) badgers her with questions about horror films before threatening to violently murder her. The young woman this time is high school student Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), and the conversation lurches around the faddish concept of "elevated horror", where she snootily describes how the only good genre movies are about trauma and psychology, in lines that aren't remotely as cutting or clever as writers James Vanderbilt & Gary Busick want them to be, and which defeat Ortega's ability to act (she improves steadily as the film goes on, but she's just dreadful in this scene). This ends with her getting attacked by a figure in black robes and the undying Ghostface mask, and we get the first big twist: unlike the people who have preceded her in four pictures, Tara lives. This is what brings her guilt-stricken elder sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Sam's boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) back to the small, murder-prone town of Woodsboro, CA from Modesto, where they've been working at a bowling alley; Sam fled five years ago, after the girls' father abandoned the family, and this has led to no end of bad blood.

Soon enough, it becomes clear that what's going on is that someone is trying to stage their own "requel", creating a real-life killing spree that can serve as the basis for Stab 9, a revival of the in-universe slasher series based on the events of the Scream movies from our own reality. And this means not just bringing back Ghostface, but several young people conveniently related to people from the original trilogy, a well as the aging stars of those old classics as well: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and Dewey Riley (David Arquette), the latter having become a miserable old sad-sack drunk following his divorce from Gale, and still around town to serve as the tangible link to the original stories, while the other two are held to brief cameos for much of the first two acts.

Other than the film's treatment of Dewey (whose decline and fall have facilitated Arquette giving his best performance in five trips to the role), most of the self-awareness is held until the finale, which is also probably the weakest part of the film, not only for that reason. Scream 5 is an rather good suspense thriller, with directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett (of the superb Ready or Not from 2019) doing some great things in keeping the tone more emphatically glowering and tense than it has been in the rest of this series; right from the opening scene, they're keeping the pacing tight and using flurries of violence to interrupt the wiry tension of the rest. It's not "scary", in that slasher films really aren't ever "scary", but it has a level of frantic alertness that works very well. Unfortunately, it's not an approach that they can do very much with once the film hits the formula-ordained "unmasking" scene, and things go awfully slack in the climax, even before we get to the ladling on of themes and in-jokes (not to mention that the whole sequence is so obviously built around the beats of the earlier films, it's almost daring us not to find it redundant and clichéd).

Up till that point, though, Scream 5 has a morbid weight to it rare in the slasher film, with just enough of the series' characteristic humor that it never becomes a chore. The kill scenes are particularly nasty and inventive, creating a kind of miniature motif of knives going into skin and then popping back out again, putting a genuinely unpleasant emphasis on the fragility of human flesh. The film is also more invested than this series has been since the first scene of the first movie in the notion that death by stabbing is both difficult to execute and extremely painful to experience. All that viciousness doesn't lend itself to flippant lightness, and it's very much to the film's credit that it never pretends otherwise; insofar as this is a comment on elevated horror (and it's really not, the special pleading of the opening scene notwithstanding), the exhausting physicality of it, and the sense of genuine human suffering that's thread through all of the violence, are one of its main ways into the gloomy seriousness of that pseudo-genre.

This is all built around an unusually well-written and well-acted ensemble cast, for a slasher movie: besides Sam, Tara, and Richie, there are no fewer than five other new characters of great narrative importance, and while they're not all equals (Mikey Madison as Amber, Tara's best friend, is particularly flat, and the character barely feels present), there's a sense of specificity and personality to them that's extremely rare in the annals of expendable teen characters in body count pictures. To a certain extent, the filmmakers don't know what to do with this bounty of winning screen presence: I am a little bit tempted to say that out of the entire new ensemble, Richie is the only one who gets a consistently satisfying character arc, and Quaid is certainly giving one of the most fleshed-out performances in the movie, while almost everybody else is playing some sort of "type" or another. Which is the norm for slasher movies, but the thing is, of course, that slasher movies aren't really good.

Scream 5, I think, is good. It is certainly good for enough of its running time to give the illusion that the rest of it works. It's maybe a little bit too comfortable replicating the beats of its forebears, and definitely too comfortable talking about how crazy it is that it's replicating the beats of its forebears, and I don't see any way around the argument that the ending deflates badly; doubly so since the ending is so eminently predictable. Still, there's an awful lot of admirable material here, which for a relic from a series and a genre so far removed from the third decade of the 21st Century, that's a pretty great achievement.

Reviews in this series.
Scream (Craven, 1996)
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)
Scream (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2022)
Scream VI (Bettinelli-Olpin & Gillett, 2023)