THE STORY – Three siblings who, after being stranded in a boat on a country river, are stalked by a faceless killer.
THE CAST – Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe, Max Mattern & Dane DiLiegro
THE TEAM – Joshua Giuliano (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
There’s a version of “River” that plays exactly like the slasher formula demands: a group of young people, an isolated location, a killer who appears and starts picking them off one by one. Joshua Giuliano’s feature debut knows that formula and also knows exactly where to bend it. What results is a film that spends its first half doing something genuinely unnerving with the genre’s oldest trick, before eventually settling, in its back half, into more familiar terrain.
The opening construction makes you lean forward as Giuliano shows you a murder scene, letting you only hear the act, like a memory. We hear a couple settling in for a quiet date, but never see them. The camera pans over their car, a case of beer in the trunk, and overheard suspicion that they are being watched. Then, a bloody leg appears. We still don’t see them as screams start and a knife pierces flesh, while the camera drifts over the woods with stillness in the aftermath. It’s an old slasher instinct to withhold the kill to build dread, but Giuliano has you fully absorbed in the sound design. You hear the killing, and your imagination does the rest. He uses this device a couple of times, each more unsettling than anything shown outright. This is a real trick, because “River” is not shy about showing brutality when it wants to. The two registers, the heard and the seen, keep trading places, creating an even greater sense of tension.
After that impressive intro, we meet the stars: three siblings reunited by their father’s death, heading out on his boat to scatter his ashes at the river spot he loved. Jessica Rothe plays Carla, the sister who left and never came back. Jane Levy plays Lucy, who stayed behind and absorbed their father’s grief without her older sister to share the weight. Max Mattern rounds out the trio as Drew, a good-natured, slightly hapless younger brother terrified of water. One reason, and one of many that Jessica reveals, that their father is not worth mourning is that he once threw Drew in the lake as a swimming lesson and nearly drowned him. This detail underscores the family’s fracture and makes you wonder whether they will survive once the slashing begins.
The sisters’ dynamic is where the film does its sharpest character work. Carla’s anger at their father, which made her want to move away, holds validity: she calls him a drunk who was cruel to their mother and refuses to soften that in death. Lucy’s relationship with the same man is murkier; she has buried the resentment rather than resolved it, and the film never pushes past that surface. We’re told she has absorbed the grief but rarely see what she actually feels about her father. The sisters’ differences needed more confrontation than the script provides. That tension simmers by the time the boat runs out of gas near a derelict bridge, miles from cell signal. These beats feel stereotypical, but the film establishes the siblings will fight for each other no matter what.
And then, a man appears on the shoreline. Dane DiLiegro plays him with the same unsettling stillness that made Michael Myers frightening; he doesn’t stalk so much as appear, present and staring, until the moment he isn’t still anymore. What follows is the film’s best sustained stretch: a killer who moves through water like it’s his own house, hunting three people who can’t get away from him by land or by river. It’s a genuinely novel premise for the genre, with the question: how do you survive a killer whose hunting ground is the exact terrain that traps you? And for a stretch, “River” plays it beautifully. Screams echo off water and rock with no clear point of origin, disorienting in a way that many slashers can’t replicate. A woman in a dress stumbles into frame, and the original white of its color is barely visible now with how much blood covers it before the killer ends her; it’s an efficient, brutal way of telling the audience exactly how outmatched everyone on that boat actually is.
However, the film doesn’t fully trust its premise. Eventually, the story moves back to land, and “River” becomes a more conventional stalk-and-survive picture. The specificity that made its first half distinctive gives way to a familiar structure. The idea of a killer who owns the water is strong enough to build the whole film around.
What doesn’t waver is the craft underneath it. The score and sound design do enormous work throughout, both hypnotic and viscerally effective, especially in the moments of heightened fear, where a killing happens entirely off-screen, and all you can hear are echoing screams. Mattern’s performance gives the film a necessary release valve, an eccentric warmth that keeps the sibling dynamic from falling completely apart. And DiLiegro’s killer, shirtless, blood splattered across his chest like a shirt he’s wearing, has a kind of hulking, silent menace, with a mask that recalls something akin to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”. There’s also a child character used sparingly but with genuinely haunting effect, a rare horror-movie kid who adds dread rather than deflating it.
The casting of the sisters couldn’t be more perfect. Levy has been circling horror’s inner circle since she anchored the 2013 “Evil Dead” remake and then went toe-to-toe with Stephen Lang in “Don’t Breathe”. This isn’t new ground for her, but she’s mostly known for things much lighter in tone, like “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” and it’s a return to a genre she’s already proven she can carry. Rothe, meanwhile, has spent the last several years quietly building a case as one of horror’s defining new faces, largely on the strength of the “Happy Death Day” films. Watching her play a woman running not from a killer in a baby mask but from her own grief and guilt, with an actual physical threat layered on top, highlights the same strengths as a performer who made you care about a character stuck in a time loop. (Admittedly, she gets much less to do here than other recent work.)
What Giuliano proves with this debut is a real command of tone and restraint and a willingness to let silence and suggestion do the work most slashers hand to a knife. When “River” trusts that instinct, uses its environment to feel like another threat, and carry the violence through sound design, it’s genuinely one of the more inventive entries the genre has produced in a while.
