Panic Fest 2026 Coverage
Break a Leg review
A two-hander that passes the knife back and forth.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Break a Leg
Directed by Kaitlyn Boyé
Written by Kaitlyn Boyé and Brendan Kelly
Starring Kaitlyn Boyé and Brendan Kelly
Break a Leg Review
One of the most pleasant surprises at this year’s Panic Fest was the two-hander Break a Leg. The story unfolds in one location with only two characters…but it absolutely hums when it gets going. This is performance based horror…relying on the charisma and abilities of its two actors for almost everything that it’s trying to do. What makes it a fun one is not knowing who to trust. Or if there’s even anything to be all that worried about in the first place.
Patrick (Brendan Kelly) arrives at a theater for an audition that never gets going. The director is MIA…and the only other person in the building is fellow auditioner Molly (Kaitlyn Boyé). When they discover they are unable to exit the building…a strange game of cat and mouse begins to unfold. Maybe.
The inability to discern if either Patrick or Molly are even in danger makes Break a Leg a fun story to watch unfurl. There are times when you are certain Molly is completely out of her mind. At other times you’ll begin to think that Patrick will snap. Other times…you just kind of think the door might have gotten jammed. The odd behaviors and unpredictable mood swings of both Molly and Patrick can be explained away by their chosen profession anyway, right? When Molly begins to ominously break down Patrick’s mind…it could just be acting. Patrick’s seemingly impending mental breakdown…it could just be his insecurities showing. Or…the old building could just have a door that got stuck.
Boyé and Kelly deliver big time as Molly and Patrick. We learn all kinds of things about them through extensive and often increasingly creepy conversations. Molly is a former child star who has fallen very far out of public favor. Is her purposeful and precise targeting of Patrick’s mindset simply the acts of a bitter actress lashing out at a relatively inexperienced potential colleague? Or is it the master plan of a disgraced star who has snapped? Is Patrick’s unstable nature the result of a career that hasn’t lived up to his expectations? Or does he know more about what’s happening than he’s letting on?
Watching Boyé and Kelly make a twisted dance out of passing the suspicions back and forth gives Break a Leg a lot of momentum. Even though its mostly watching two people talk in an empty theater…Break a Leg has some great pacing. It’s never boring. In fact, watching the actors get on stage for a failed rehearsal is somehow a pretty thrilling part of the movie. The surprisingly bloody climax feels as fitting as it does vibrant and exciting.
There is a lot of talk about the difficulty of the profession. It’s a clever way to escalate tension while excusing it at the same time. You can understand why both the embittered Molly and the sad sack Patrick act the way they do. But you can just as easily understand why their careers to that point would drive them into dangerous territory. Maybe one or both of them has lost it and arrived with nefarious ideas. Maybe a stuck door was all they needed to push them over the edge anyway. Either way…Break a Leg sets two opposing forces against each other and lets you sit back and enjoy the show.
Scare Value
Kaitlyn Boyé and Brendan Kelly turn Break a Leg into an inevitable war of attrition. Their performances range from fearful to feared for…sometimes in the same scene. The pressures of sustaining an acting career, the increasingly dangerous clashes between two very different personalities, that pesky locked door…whatever sets them off…Break a Leg‘s two leads find a way to make it interesting. The bloody climax gives the movie some memorable visuals and allows both actors to shake up the formula in a way that feels earned and exciting. For a movie that could have easily hit spots that dragged…Break a Leg keeps things flowing in a fun, and potentially deadly, direction.
