Scream VI

Scream VI arrives sounding very sure of itself. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin takes the wheel and drives the survivors out of small-town repetition and into a bigger, meaner playground — New York City — where the rules that used to protect them no longer behave in the same way.

That shift matters because this is a movie that keeps its eye on people as much as on the mask. The Carpenter sisters are now living in a place that should promise anonymity and reinvention; instead, their past refuses to stay dead. Jenna Ortega’s Tara is one of the film’s most visible hooks, and Melissa Barrera’s Sam remains the sibling who carries the mess the family didn’t choose. And when the franchise reflex kicks in — the shrine to past killers, the phone calls that wind you up — Scream VI uses those familiar gestures not as lazy callbacks but as a deliberate way to ask why anyone would keep making the same “movie” again and again.

It opens with something quietly modern: a professor is catfished and then murdered by a student wearing the Ghostface costume. It’s shorthand for how the franchise now mixes old slasher signifiers with contemporary cruelties.

From there the plot tightens around a grim fan-fiction idea: Jason and his roommate Greg plan to finish the story Richie and Amber left behind by targeting Sam and Tara Carpenter. It’s a tidy premise — copycat killers, a revenge-minded sequel — that gives the film a clear engine.

That engine works because it forces old and new tensions to meet. The previous crimes are still a blueprint for violence, and this film treats the attempt to ‘complete the movie’ as something both personal and performative.

So Scream VI doesn’t open with a mystery for mystery’s sake. It sets up a repeat performance — killers trying to finish what earlier killers started — and asks who gets to write the sequel.

Tara might look, on paper, like one of several survivors the franchise has gathered. Jenna Ortega plays her, yes, but what makes Tara stick in the memory is how the film positions her as someone trying to carve space for herself when the rest of the world remembers only the worst things that happened to her family.

She’s part of a found household: the Carpenter sisters living in New York alongside fellow survivors and students. That shared history keeps the threat immediate and personal; these aren’t random victims, they’re people whose lives have been folded together by trauma.

What changes her from background to action-figure is how involved she is when the violence lands. Tara is not merely someone to be rescued — she takes a knife to one of the attackers in the final mêlée, a blunt, bloody moment that underlines how far the sisters will go to protect one another.

And crucially, the film lets her keep moving afterwards. The ending is interested in giving Tara room to live, and in asking Sam to loosen the reins. That promise of independence is what makes Tara feel like a character who matters beyond a scream.

On the surface it’s slasher mechanics and murder set-pieces. Underneath, Scream VI keeps returning to family — not just blood ties but the way families try to protect one another and fail, and then keep trying anyway.

Mortality and lifespan are threaded through that: who lives, who dies, who carries the memory. The film treats surviving as a kind of long-term labour; it’s less about being scarred in a single night and more about living with the echo of those nights for years.

Parental protection, too, is an engine here. When Gale tells the group that Sidney has gone into hiding to protect her family, it’s a reminder that survival can mean absence as well as presence — sometimes the safest thing is to step away and watch from the sidelines. Loss and authority turn up in practical ways: newcomers who want revenge for a dead sibling, a detective who will betray his badge, and institutions that are no guarantee of safety. The film keeps bringing these forces into conflict with ordinary attempts to get on with life.

It’s a 2023 movie through and through. That matters, because contemporary horror tends to be allergic to nostalgia for its own sake; Scream VI keeps the franchise long enough to play with it, but refuses to live off old glories.

Moving the Carpenters to New York is a very 2020s move — the idea that survivors should be able to vanish into a crowd, yet still be hunted, speaks to a decade where privacy and reinvention are complicated business.

The film also wears its franchise-awareness openly: it’s comfortable referencing past rules, past killers and past headlines, then using those references to twist expectations rather than just tick a fan-service box.

Put simply: Scream VI feels like a 2020s horror sequel because it’s less interested in repeating the old movie and more interested in asking what the old movie does to the people left behind.

The film’s argument about family and protection still lands. The central tensions — siblings who must guard one another, parents who are capable of betrayal, and communities that weaponise grief — feel timeless in a way that dialogue and jump scares cannot buy.

Sidney Prescott’s decision to go into hiding, relayed to the group, is an effective reminder that survival sometimes looks like absence. That choice still rings true: a grown-up response rather than a neat cinematic solution.

The motive reveal — that the killers are avenging a lost sibling and protecting a family legacy — is a blunt device, but it keeps the stakes emotional rather than merely procedural. Revenge rooted in family ties gives the assaults a nasty logic that isn’t easily shrugged off.

What ages less neatly is any attempt to use franchise trappings as shorthand for complexity. The shrine to past killers and the catalogue of masks will still thrill franchise completists, but they can feel like ornaments if the film doesn’t pause long enough to reckon with why those objects exist for the characters.

There’s a practical reason people still bring this one up: it refuses to treat survivors as props. The Carpenters and their circle are active throughout, living in New York, going to classes, arguing and fighting back. That continuity matters more than any single set-piece.

Mindy’s aside — that the killer seems to be following franchise rules — gives the film something to chew on beyond gore. It turns the franchise’s own mechanics into a piece of the puzzle, a bit of meta-commentary that doubles as a problem for the characters to solve.

Then there’s the image of the abandoned theatre set up as a shrine to past killers: a literal museum of violence. It’s a tidy piece of mise-en-scène that binds the franchise’s history to the new plot and forces the present characters to confront an industry of spectacle built on their pain. Finally, Scream VI anchors its scares in contemporary hazards: an online smear campaign that ruins a survivor’s life, killers who infiltrate ordinary households, and the way family grief can be weaponised. Those notes make the film feel like a sequel that wants to mean something to the characters, not just to the audience.

Yes — if you want a franchise instalment that cares about the people living under its mythology. Scream VI is a 2023 slasher that chooses family, revenge and the burden of survival as its real subjects, and it rewards patience: the sisters don’t just survive, they fight back and then try to let one another live.

It’s 118 minutes that balance scares with a surprising amount of domestic business: Sam in therapy and publicly pilloried, Tara trying to make a life, friends who become immediate family. Those choices give the film an emotional ballast the jump-scares alone could never supply.

The finale hands the siblings agency — they gain the upper hand and, afterwards, Sam makes a line that matters, discarding a mask and following Tara into the city rather than staying to play the villain’s ghost. That felt like a proper note to end on: messy, forward-looking and faintly defiant.

If you’re deciding whether to watch it now: go for the way it turns franchise mechanics into personal drama. It’s not the last word on Scream, but it’s a sharp, modern take that remembers why the survivors are the parts you should care about.