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No one would blame you for looking at Thinestra and thinking, “oh, it’s The Substance again.” Both films use an underexplained beauty product as a way to navigate how women are treated in entertainment and the pressure to always be beautiful. While The Substance goes after how women are treated in front of the camera, Thinestra gives us a glimpse behind the scenes.

It has things to say. Whether it says them clearly is a different question.

Meet Penny

Our protagonist is Penny, a young visual editor played by Michelle Macedo. Specifically, she edits the photos of paper thin models. She is surrounded by perfection all day and none of it is hers. After asking one of the models what it feels like to be perfect, she is handed a mystery pill with no explanation.

Something in the Ozempic family, as the film frames it, which is a good choice given that we are living through a cultural moment where weight loss drugs are reshaping beauty standards in real time. After struggling with her size for a bit, Penny pops the thing and waits to see what happens. You know, normal Tuesday activity.

What happens is that the weight she loses comes back. As her. Penelope, played by Michelle’s actual identical twin, Melissa Macedo, shows up as the ravenous doppelganger Penny just shed. The twin casting is not a gimmick. It is the smartest thing the film does. There is something genuinely uncanny about watching two identical people share a frame when one of them is supposed to be the literal embodiment of everything the other one is running from.

All of this plays out against a sweltering Los Angeles Christmas, which is its own kind of horror.

The Good Stuff

The first thing that comes to mind when watching Thinestra is odd. This is not a derogatory remark. Odd is always good in horror. The film features a toilet twin, a donut chamber, and a surprising amount of evil food. All of these things work beautifully for the comedy side of the film. Director Nathan Hertz has a clear vision for the film’s more absurdist moments and those moments land.

Hertz has said in press materials that “Penelope is not the villain. She is the symptom. The real antagonist is the voice in Penny’s head that tells her she is not enough.” That is a genuinely good thesis. The film knows what it is trying to do. Whether it follows through is the issue.

Where It Falls Apart

Thinestra never finds its balance between drama and comedy. Some scenes are over the top silly while others go immediately deadpan. The film is engaged in a kind of tonal whiplash that makes it difficult to stay invested in what is actually happening to Penny on an emotional level. You get pulled out right when you should be pulled in.

The special effects have the same problem. The donut dungeon looks disgusting and wonderfully delicious all at once, and it works. Some of the body horror effects do not hold up as well. It is worth noting that this is an indie production and budget has a lot to do with that. But the inconsistency is still noticeable in a way that undercuts the scarier moments.

The Bigger Picture

Thinestra comes from a long line of feminist body horror, and it genuinely tries to tackle heavy subjects. The Ozempic framing is timely in a way that The Ugly Stepsister and The Substance were not quite working with, and that specificity gives the film a sharp cultural edge when it leans into it. The problem is that it does not always lean into it. It gets distracted by its own weirdness, which is charming, but removes the atmosphere that would make the horror actually hurt.

This is not a bad film. Thinestra is funny, gross, and imaginative in ways most Hollywood films are not. It took home the VORTEX Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Award Grand Prize on the festival circuit and screened at Sitges, Raindance, and Screamfest, among others. There is real craft here and real ambition.

But in a genre that is currently producing work as precise as The Ugly Stepsister and as unrelenting as The Substance, Thinestra does not quite make its impression. It has the right ingredients. It just needed a longer cook time.

Where to Watch

Thinestra is streaming now via Breaking Glass Pictures.

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Full disclosure: I know almost nothing about Aztec culture. I am not a historian, and I am not a scholar. I am a horror writer who watched a Mexican psychological thriller at midnight and cried about it. The good news is that none of my ignorance matters, because Sacrificios is not making an argument you need a textbook to follow. It is making an argument that is written into every parent who has ever sat at a hospital bedside and thought, take me instead.

You will understand this film completely. I promise.

One more thing before we get into it. The first fifteen minutes have some effects that are a little rough around the edges. Push through. I am serious. Whatever you think is happening in those opening scenes is not representative of what this film becomes. Stay in your seat.

What Is Actually Happening

Juan is a father. His young son dies. Then the ocean gives him back.

That is the setup, and the film is smart enough not to over-explain it. Director Mauricio Chernovetzky and co-writer Alexander Ioshpe are not interested in the mechanics of the miracle. They are interested in the price. And the price is this, to keep his son alive, Juan has to feed him his own blood. Not metaphorically. Literally. The child drinks from his father until there is nothing left to drink.

You know, light family viewing.

The Sacrifice Thing Is The Whole Movie

I want to sit with this for a second because it is genuinely one of the more brutal premises I have encountered in recent horror, and the film earns every drop of it.

There is something ancient about the image of a father slowly pouring himself out, so his child can live. I am not qualified to tell you where exactly this imagery lives in the specific cultural tradition the film is drawing from. What I can tell you is that it did not need to explain itself to me. The act translates. A parent giving everything they have, past the point of survival, so their child does not have to face whatever comes next. That is not a Mexican idea or an Aztec idea. That is a human idea. It has been a human idea for as long as humans have had children they could not bear to lose.

Chernovetzky has said this film is dedicated to his and Ioshpe’s fathers, and that the question driving the whole thing was, is there a limit to how much a father would be willing to sacrifice? The grief, the silence, the weight carried alone. Watching Juan answer that question over 92 minutes is not comfortable. It is not supposed to be.

The film asks what you would trade for one more day. And then it makes you watch Juan trade everything.

The Dreamlike Stuff

The film lives in the same territory as Jacob’s Ladder and The Witch, which the filmmakers themselves have cited as touchstones. That is a confident comparison to make, and they back it up. You are never fully sure what is real and what is happening inside Juan’s collapsing mind, and the film is deliberate about keeping you in that uncertainty. The dreamlike quality is not atmosphere for its own sake. It is the logic of grief. When you are inside that kind of loss, the line between what happened and what you are imagining happening gets very thin very fast.

Cinematographer Grzegorz Bartoszewicz shoots the Mexican landscape like it knows what Juan did. There is a heat and a weight to every frame. The wrongness is baked in from the beginning, so when things fall apart it feels less like a reveal and more like an inevitability.

The Cast

Jorge Jimenez, who you know from Narcos and The Black Demon, is carrying this whole thing on his face, and he does not drop it once. The specific acting challenge here is playing a man who has made a decision the audience understands completely and would probably make themselves, while also making it clear that the decision is destroying him.

Does It Land

Co-writer Ioshpe said that at the 2025 Austin Film Festival, audiences stood in the wings waiting to share their own stories of grief and loss after screenings. The film won the Audience Award there and now makes its Latin American premiere at the 22nd Fantaspoa International Fantastic Film Festival in Brazil this April. That trajectory tells you what you need to know about whether it works emotionally.

It does. This is a slow burn that earns its slow. If you are here for jump scares, wrong movie. If you are here for something that is going to sit quietly in the back of your head for a few days and occasionally tap you on the shoulder, you found it.

Get past the first fifteen minutes. Stay until the end. Try not to call your dad on the way home.

No promises on that last one.

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It has been twenty-two years since Don Mancini’s Chucky was last in a movie theater. Not on streaming. Not on cable. In an actual theater, where you paid for a ticket and sat in the dark with strangers and watched a Good Guy doll wreak havoc on a big screen. Seed of Chucky came out in 2004, and that was the last time Don Mancini put his guy on the big screen. That’s a long time to wait.

The wait is ending. This weekend at Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, Mancini confirmed he is currently writing a brand new Child’s Play film built for theatrical release.

Okay, Here’s What We Know

Dread Central confirmed the announcement and the details are the right details. Mancini is specifically modeling the new film on what Curse of Chucky did in 2013. If you remember, Curse came out of nowhere after the full self-parody of Seed, stripped everything back to one location, turned the lights off, and made Chucky genuinely frightening again. Then it connected to the whole timeline in a late reveal that made longtime fans lose their minds in the best possible way. That approach worked so well it almost felt like an apology letter. The new film is aiming for the same thing.

The tonal goal is scary. Not campy. Not self-aware. Scary in the way the original Child’s Play was scary, in the way Curse was scary. The version of Chucky that made a two-foot doll feel like an actual threat. Mancini has not forgotten how to do that. He just hasn’t had the budget and the big screen to do it on in a very long time.

The TV show’s events will be acknowledged and kept in canon. Because of course they will. This is Don Mancini. The man has maintained continuity across this franchise for nearly four decades. He is not throwing anything out.

A Brief and Painful Recent History

After Seed of Chucky, the franchise went dark on the big screen for nine years.Curse of Chucky in 2013 went straight to VOD. Cult of Chucky in 2017 did the same. Both were genuinely excellent. Both deserved bigger audiences than direct to video could give them.

Then the TV series launched on Syfy in 2021 and gave Mancini something no single film ever could, which was room. Three seasons. The full mythology. Pretty much every surviving character from across the franchise. A young gay lead that Mancini has spoken about being genuinely proud of.

Then Syfy cancelled it.

Mancini was blindsided. His statement at the time: “I’m heartbroken over the news that Chucky won’t be coming back for a fourth season. Chucky will return. He ALWAYS comes back.”

He was not wrong. He just didn’t say how.

The Man Has Been Planning This for a While

This announcement did not come from nowhere. Back in 2024, before the fan base had even fully processed the cancellation, Mancini told the Scream Dreams Podcast that something was already forming. Fangoria covered the reveal and the quote is very Don Mancini: “I’m in the early stages of starting to develop one now, which is designed to work in tandem with the TV show. The ongoing attempt to try to conquer the universe with Chucky.”

Two years later, “early stages” has become “I am writing it” and theatrical is confirmed. This franchise has always moved at its own pace. Mancini doesn’t make Chucky movies because a studio put it on a release calendar. He makes them when he has something to say. Apparently he has something to say.

Why This Matters More Than Just Another Sequel

We’ve covered a lot of Chucky news over the years here at iHorror. We were there for Season Two’s launch, when the show was building real momentum and Mancini was having the time of his life letting Chucky run wild through a Catholic school with Jennifer Tilly and Brad Dourif. Good times. The show had a devoted audience that understood exactly what it was trying to do.

But there’s something that a theatrical horror film can do that a cable TV series never quite can. It controls the room. You can’t pause it, can’t look at your phone, can’t back it up and rewatch the scary part through your fingers from the safety of your couch. A horror film in a theater, especially one that’s actually trying to be frightening, is a shared experience in a way that streaming and television haven’t figured out how to replicate. The last time Chucky was in that room, it was 2004 and the film was Seed of Chucky, which was a very different kind of movie from what Mancini is apparently planning now.

Mancini has always been best when he’s working against the expectations the franchise built. Curse of Chucky came out of nowhere after the self-parody of Seed and reminded everyone that this character could still be genuinely menacing. A theatrical release modeled on that same instinct, scary and focused and connected to everything that came before, is exactly the kind of Chucky movie we didn’t know we were waiting for until this weekend.

What We Don’t Know Yet

No cast has been announced. No release date. Mancini is writing. That’s what we have. Given the franchise’s history, that could mean we’re eighteen months out or three years out, because this is not a franchise that rushes itself and that has mostly been to its benefit.

What we do know is that the man who has been telling Charles Lee Ray’s story since 1988 is not done with it. Chucky has survived VOD, survived cable cancellation, survived a reboot he had nothing to do with, survived everything. A Good Guy doll never really dies. He just keeps coming back.

We’ll be watching for updates. And we’ll be in that theater.