We need to talk about Alexandra McVicker.
I came into The Serpent’s Skin ready to watch Alice Maio Mackay do her thing. And she does, we’ll get there. But McVicker as Anna stopped me cold within the first ten minutes and didn’t let go. She’s playing timid in a way I haven’t seen done right in a long time. There’s this quality to her where you can feel how carefully she’s holding herself, like she’s protecting something she knows is fragile but real, and every time the camera goes in close you catch it. Mackay leans into those close-ups hard, Obsession-style. The kind of framing where a face becomes its own landscape, and McVicker rewards it every single time. The hope sitting underneath all that timidity is quiet enough that you might miss it if you’re not paying attention. Don’t miss it. It’s the whole movie.
Okay. Mackay. Six features, twenty-one years old, and The Serpent’s Skin is where she lands on the version of herself she’s been moving toward since So Vam. The trans experience isn’t the plot here so much as it’s the weather. It’s in how Anna walks into rooms, in what she’s leaving behind before we even meet her, in what the stakes actually are when the supernatural stuff kicks in. You don’t get a monologue explaining any of it. If you live inside it, you’ll feel the whole shape. If you don’t, you’ll still have a good time, which is the harder trick and the one she pulls off. Her trajectory across these films has been toward exactly this. Trans characters moved from background to center, and now center to core. The Serpent’s Skin is where that project feels complete.
There’s a scene with Danny, where he hits on Anna, and the sexual tension in that scene seeps through the screen in a way that I was not expecting from a Tuesday afternoon screener. The chemistry is real, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s good. And then Danny transforms, and the makeup team gave him something right out of the Buffyverse practical effects playbook. That same textured ridge work, monsters that feel like they share actual air with the people they’re threatening. The whole sequence recontextualizes everything that came before it. It’s a good piece of filmmaking. The setup earns the scare.
One note, offered with love: there is an intimate scene where someone spits on their hand. I understand the intention. A woman this competent in every other area of her life would carry lube. She should carry lube. This is my only complaint about The Serpent’s Skin and I recognize how good that is.
The whole visual world is neon-soaked in a way that feels deliberate at every level rather than just aesthetic. Every color is a reference or a warning. The festival circuit noticed. They were right.
Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about, though. The Serpent’s Skin is a very good movie that is also, structurally, a pilot. The mythology has room in it. Anna and Gen and the world they’re building has room in it. I want eight seasons of twenty-two episodes. I want monster of the week. I want to watch this relationship grow across years in the same way we got to watch the Winchesters figure their lives out, except this time nobody’s queerness is subtext, nobody’s trans identity is a twist, and the story belongs to them from the start. Give us that show. Someone give us that show now.
But until then we have this, and this is worth your time and your money and the drive to wherever it’s playing near you. Horror has been asking for a film that centers queer women without making the queerness the tragedy, that uses the supernatural as something other than a metaphor for shame, that trusts its audience enough to just tell the story and let us feel it. The Serpent’s Skin is that film. Alice Maio Mackay made it at twenty-one. We should probably all be embarrassed about that, in the best possible way.
Where to see it:
Now playing New York, NY — March 27 | Los Angeles, CA — April 3
Upcoming screenings
- 4/10, 4/11 — Denver, CO — Sie FilmCenter
- 4/11 — Boston, MA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Boston Seaport
- 4/11 — Chicago, IL — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Wrigleyville
- 4/11 — Dallas, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Cedars
- 4/11 — Denton, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Denton
- 4/11 — New York, NY — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan
- 4/11 — Yonkers, NY — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Yonkers
- 4/11 — Raleigh, NC — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Raleigh
- 4/11 — San Antonio, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Park North
- 4/11 — San Francisco, CA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission
- 4/11 — Santa Clara, CA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Valley Fair
- 4/11 — Woodbury, MN — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Woodbury
- 4/11 — Naples, FL — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Naples
- 4/11, 4/13 — Denver, CO — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Sloans Lake
- 4/11, 4/14 — Austin, TX — Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar
- 4/25 — Sacramento, CA — The Dreamland Cinema
- 5/14 — Sebastopol, CA — Rialto Cinema
- 6/8 — Portland, OR — Clinton Street Theater