When a new Ghostface killer emerges in the town where Sidney Prescott has built a new life, her darkest fears are realized as her daughter becomes the next target.

First off, it is great to see Neve Campbell back in the driver’s seat of a Scream movie. She is the heart of the franchise and while she skipped the last movie, the one before was also only marginally connected to her character of Sidney Prescott, the true heroine of the original movie and the first three sequels. It’s also fun to see original killer (one of them at least) Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) back in an imaginative way. We saw him die in the first one, but conspiracy theories abound both in the context of the movie universe and from fans online that he could’ve survived. Is he a ghost, a dream or vision (like how his partner Billy Loomis’ actor Skeet Ulrich appeared in the last movie), or something else entirely? I’ll not spoil it here.

The movie is built around perpetual trauma survivor Sidney’s relationship with her daughter Tatum (Isabel May), who is now the same age Sidney was when she first got terrorized by ghostface. There is some true weight to their arguments and Campbell is great as a badass mom struggling to keep everything together especially when another masked killer starts attacking. And she has an easy rapport with her husband played by Joel McHale. But that’s about where the good in the movie ends.

It’s filled with fresh new faces to be cannon fodder, who are brutally offed in merciless and tortuous ways, but since you don’t really get to know any of them, the deaths don’t serve any other purpose other than cringe. Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding, two of the leads from the last two movies, are shoehorned in with no development or reason. Even Gale Weathers, Courtney Cox’s plucky reporter who is the only actor to appear in all seven movies feels like a glorified cameo.

All of this could’ve been salvaged by a denouement that is shocking and makes sense, but alas it’s neither. Co-written by original Scream scribe Kevin Williamson, who also directs, the movie eschews a lot of the meta-commentary that marked the original (although there is one particularly cringe-worthy scene with Savoy Brown where she attempts to do it). It gives a lot of grace to the character of Sidney, but it’s mostly a forgettable slog that will likely only be somewhat engaging to completionists (like me), or fans of new and brutal ways teenagers can get tortured.

Jonathan’s grade – D+