‘Psycho Killer’ Review: Out of Touch Satanic Crime Thriller Misses Its Mark
Psycho Killer hits theaters this weekend with the kind of pedigree that will make horror fans lean in. Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the script; he’s the same Hollywood legend behind stone-cold classics like Se7en, 8MM, and Sleepy Hollow, the latter still being one of my favorite films of all time. Gavin Polone (Zombieland: Double Tap) directs, and Georgina Campbell stars following her breakout genre turn in Zach Cregger’s Barbarian.
The story moves with familiar procedural beats. Campbell plays Jane, a young state trooper analyst who finds herself pulled into the orbit of a ritualistic serial killer stalking snowbound highways and isolated rural communities. Sounds familiar, right? Cryptic satanic symbols mark the crime scenes. Bodies pile up along desolate roads. The investigation points toward the occult, or at least something that wants to appear occult.
Jane digs into the killer’s psychology while battling skepticism from her superiors and confronting the growing realization that this case stretches beyond a routine manhunt. The bones of a gripping crime thriller sit right there, in a burlap bag, on the coffee table. Yet the film never quite assembles them into something whole or connected.
With that said, this movie does not lack style. It frames snow-covered highways with a stark, almost Fargo-like bleakness. It lingers on frozen landscapes and empty stretches of road. The camera finds moments of iciness that suggest both real intention and craft. Campbell usually grounds it all with a performance that feels thoughtful and steady. She plays Jane with intelligence and restraint. She does her best to communicate doubt without collapsing into fragility. And it works. But still, the script is constantly attempting to flatten her out, and resists permitting her character depth or the ability to activate.
That resistance highlights the film’s core issue. For a script from one of our most important living screenwriters, Psycho Killer feels strangely dated. It leans on familiar genre devices and never meaningfully reframes them. I kept waiting for the film to signal self-awareness. I kept expecting a turn that would acknowledge the tropes it so eagerly embraces. That turn never really arrives. The tone remains so straight-faced that it becomes difficult to tell whether it is sincere or satirical. The result lands somewhere awkward or even a bit silly.
Beyond its awful title, nowhere do those dated instincts show more clearly than in its use of Satanism. The film treats pentagrams and occult symbols as if they still carry automatic cultural shock. They do not. In 2026, Satanism as horror shorthand feels step beyond laziness. The richer conversation sits in the history of satanic panic and the way fear of ritual abuse once fueled moral hysteria and political agendas. Psycho Killer does not explore any of that. It simply drapes satanic imagery over its plot and expects tension to follow. It reads as out of touch.
And then there is the comparison that hangs over the entire experience. Longlegs. I thought about it before the film started. I thought about it during. I thought about it walking out. The parallels stack up. Vague satanic symbolism that never pays off. A young underdog investigator cut from the Clarice Starling cloth. A chilly, methodical tone. Even the aesthetic overlap feels deliberate. Longlegs is at least committed to its own strange and unique visual logic. Psycho Killer seems to chase that template without really understanding it. It plays like a bargain shelf echo of a film it wants to resemble. And even the film it wants to be is a misguided choice.
In all honesty, the movie occasionally does jolt to life. A late night roadside encounter swerves in an unexpected direction and pulled an audible reaction from me. And a sequence involving a satanic cult spirals into grotesque chaos and briefly embraces its own absurdity. Those sequences are alive with untamed genre energy. Unfortunately, they also suffer from some distractingly artificial CGI blood that drains all of this on impact, especially in a standout scene that starts as an orgy and quickly descends into ruthless carnage. The excess works big time. The digital shortcuts don’t.
Strangely, what Psycho Killer most resembles are the mid 2000s wave of grim, self-serious shocker thrillers rather than the prestige crime horror it seems to admire. I kept thinking of Suspect Zero and that era of overheated procedural horror. Identity floats nearby as a tonal cousin, though that one operates on a far higher frequency of fun. Psycho Killer carries that same intensity and melodrama, just without the structural sharpness to support it. Had this landed in 2004, it might have thrived. In 2026, it feels lost in limbo between eras.
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Psycho Killer
Summary
‘Psycho Killer’ has some style and benefits from a committed lead performance, but it can’t outrun its own outdated instincts.