Rock Springs (2026)

 

Rock Springs challenges me.

On the one hand, there’s the film itself, and on the other, there’s what the film aims to achieve. In a perfect world, these two components sync, each lending power to the other, but this is not a perfect world. While I appreciate what Rock Springs aspires to be about and ultimately admire where it lands, there’s no denying that the path to reach that ending doesn’t work, a mess of clunky exposition and distracting camera work that undermines the storytelling.

Told in three parts, Rock Springs begins with the recently widowed Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), who moves her family to Rock Springs, Wyoming. The move is unpopular: her young daughter, Gracie (Aria Kim), refuses to speak, and her mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), is obsessed with spirits and old superstitions. But Rock Springs has a dark history, and the film’s second chapter shifts toward it. In 1885, a mob of white settlers attacks and swarms a camp of Chinese miners. After watching that massacre’s effects on Ah Tseng and He Yew (Benedict Wong and Jimmy O. Yang), we return to Emily as the past and future collide.

 

The grisly massacre at the center of the film is no figment of filmmaking imagination, a fact I learned in text during the end credits. I did not watch the Q&A with director Vera Miao, but it’s clear that bringing this atrocity to light motivated this film. The strongest parts of Rock Springs deal with the violence. The 1885 section plays like a horror movie with characters yanked upward and tension built as the monsters close in. To watch Wong hobble off on Yang’s shoulder while whistling flannel-clad men lurk inches away is harrowing. Likewise, the film’s ending works by turning toward memorial and freeing the dead. It reminds me of Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, actually. It put a lump in my throat. It works.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the rest of Rock Springs. Played as an atmospheric horror movie, the film dances between tired tropes to stoke discomfort. There are amorphous dream worlds, creepy dolls, ghosts leaning into the frame, and rattling bushes—nothing’s new or compelling about any of them. Did I find a few creepy while watching in the early morning darkness? Absolutely. But there’s no cohesion to any of it. They feel tacked on; they entice horror fans to watch and learn about historical terror, but their poor execution weakens the rest of the experience. The script does itself no favors either, adopting a three-chapter structure that backtracks unnecessarily. It wasn’t hard to connect the dots between chapters one and three, but the filmmakers presumed we couldn’t follow.

Moreover, the camera work is a flat-out mess. Despite my limited vocabulary, I watch enough movies to recognize when something’s off, and Rock Springs is distractingly bad. I could feel the camera hustling to heighten the horror elements, but the constant shifting persistently pulled me out of the scenes. I can’t remember a busier movie of shot compositions. Inverted shots, fishbowl lenses, and Dutch angles disrupt the first chapter while struggling to focus on Gracie’s perspective, but then it races between awkward pans, monstercam POV, and Blair Witch shaky handhelds around otherwise well-composed shots that feel like they could fall straight out of Ari Aster. Pick a lane! I wanted to yell at the TV. It tried too hard to evoke superior horror movies, no doubt hoping to lift its genre bonafides to sell its important history lesson.

And all this leads to a monster that I can only call disappointing. I understand it thematically, sure, but the effects work fails. What aims for Cronenbergian instead becomes a potato-frog without sufficient budget to sharpen. While I can forgive that from an independent film with something meaningful to share, I can’t pretend it works effects-wise, and that’s too bad.

There are no doubt cultural elements here that I miss. Rock Springs bluntly narrates several of them, but never with sufficient specificity to convince me that they were real. The film’s mission is sharp, but nothing else here is. I wanted to enjoy it, but the whirlwind of trick shots, the disjointed structure, and the underwhelming script and creature effects prevent the movie from matching that mission.

Perhaps focusing solely on the massacre could have better served Rock Springs. After all, that section plays like a true horror movie because it actually was one, and the hints at back-story suggest several characters worthy of fleshing out. I like Tran and the idea of intersecting the horror genre with this historical reckoning, but that genre mashup doesn’t work here. It left me looking for a literal monster and thinking about better-executed films for long stretches of its runtime.

 
I’m glad to know about the real Rock Springs’ place in history, but Rock Springs as a film disappointed me.

Watched via the Sundance Film Festival's Online Screening