Hello, and welcome to another edition of “Mildly Vague Film Festival Reviews” where we bring you the latest scoop on upcoming movies that are probably best enjoyed knowing as little as possible. It’s hard work but we do what we can 🫡. Here at MVFFR, we try to keep the spoilers to a minimum while still giving you an impression of what makes a movie like Imposters worth checking out, without giving away all the gory details that make it great. On the docket today: A new twist on an old fave for fans of Pet Sematary (1989) and Happy Death Day (2017).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A family member goes missing under mysterious circumstances BUT just when it’s looking like all hope is lost, they return (under even more mysterious circumstances!). The loved one they feared was dead has come home again…but if you look closely, something just isn’t quite right about them. It’s a familiar setup that horror fans will immediately recognize, and a plot that often feels like it’s been wrung dry of fresh ideas. Turns out, we’re all wrong! There’s still new space to explore, and fresh ideas to be had in the “Creepy Family Member Returns” sub-genre.
“I thought I knew all the beats of this dang movie but I was way wrong. “
Written and directed by Caleb Philips, Imposters celebrated its World Premiere at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival in the fest’s Midnighter program. This sci-fi/horror surprise stars Happy Death Day‘s Jessica Rothe and Russian Doll‘s Charlie Barnett as Marie & Paul, a husband and wife on the verge of divorce whose relationship is put to the test when their infant son suddenly disappears during a house-warming party. Paul is convinced that Orson (Bates Wilder), the obligatory Creepy-Guy-In-Town, has something to do with it but there is simply no trace of what happened to their son, and no clues as to where he might have been taken.
In a desperate attempt to leave no stone unturned, Marie consults Orson who points her to a cave entrance hidden in the woods behind their house. To Paul’s surprise, when Marie emerges from the cave, she’s carrying their son in her arms! None of this makes any sense to Paul but his family is back together, and everything is as it should be. Until, of course, he begins to suspect that the child isn’t his own little boy. And something about Marie has changed as well….
It sounds like a stereotypical skeleton for a story, and one that you might think is pretty cut and dry. Either Marie and the baby are monsters, or they’re aliens, or clones, or whatever you’ve seen 100,000 times already. But Imposters is more clever than it lets on and it slowly peels back the facade of a framework to reveal something (if I’m’ being perfectly honest) more interesting than I was expecting. I thought I knew all the beats of this dang movie but I was way wrong.
Imposters does what you hope all new movies will do- it catches you off guard and throws you a curve ball just when you think you’ve got it all figured out. Sure, some of (a lot of) Paul’s dialogue is a little overwritten, and Marie’s character feels a little too one-note for how electric and dynamic we know Jessica Rothe can be, but the story is the main attraction here. And under the big top tent of sci-fi horror/thrillers, it’s always refreshing to see a spectacular that defies expectations and pushes the needle forward on a subgenre you had worried reached its peak some time ago.
“Imposters does what you hope all new movies will do- it catches you off guard and throws you a curve ball just when you think you’ve got it all figured out.”
Charlie Barnett’s Imposters celebrated its World Premiere at the 2026 SXSW. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the festival, and let us know what you thought of Imposters in the #SpoilerZone channel of the Nightmare on Film Street Discord. Social Media is A Cesspool. Come Hang Where The Cool Creeps Are.
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