Panic Fest 2025 Coverage
Stalkers review
Stalkers finds a new way to create suspects. Maybe.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Stalkers
Directed by Paul Thompson
Written by Maryna Gaidar and Luke Sneyd
Starring Olivia Stadler and Scarlett DiCaro
Stalkers Review
Stalkers makes some strange choices. The oddest one may be how straight it chooses to tell its story. It’s presented as a straightforward mother/daughter drama with a whodunnit aspect, and some bloody murders tossed into the mix. Characters (and the script itself) make some baffling choices throughout the story. Strange enough to have, perhaps, played out better in a movie that doesn’t take itself so seriously. The moments where Stalkers cuts loose are the ones that fair the best.
Stalkers opens as a pure horror movie. Charlotte’s (Scarlett DiCaro) life is upended when her parents are brutally murdered by an unseen killer. Kate (Olivia Stadler) is contacted by former classmate Justine (Allisha Pelletier) to inform her that Charlotte, who Kate gave up for adoption, is about to be put into the foster system. Kate is a famous porn star who wants to get out of the industry…and decides to return home to Michigan to give motherhood a try.
Ok. There’s a lot to unpack here. First, I’m not sure child services would contact a birth mother who gave their child up for adoption under these circumstances. Even if the case worker knew the mother in high school. It’s not the biggest logic leap that Stalkers asks you to make…but it’s an immediate one. The biggest leap required is how Kate is handed a mansion with an indoor swimming pool by another former classmate Mike (Abbas Wahab) once she arrives in Michigan. This is just insane. The luck involved with having an old acquaintance that you barely remember sitting on an empty house due to recent inheritance…who just…happens to bump into you at a supermarket and offers it to you for nothing. A lot of Stalkers feels random. We even meet the two cops who will play a part in the investigation in the most randomly artificial ways. Things that would make sense in the subtly surreal town of Twin Peaks…but stand out in a grounded city in Michigan.
I want to give Stalkers a bit of credit before I continue with this line of thinking. It’s called Stalkers. These narrative leaps would be eyerolling in a standard drama…as this movie presents itself most of the time. They work better when you remember that there is a dangerous person about who has set their sights on Kate. The absurd actions of Justine and Mike make them big time suspects. There’s no other explanation for these events. Someone murders her daughter’s adoptive parents…lures her back home…and hands her a place to live. With a basement she is told never to go into, by the way.
There are other ideas like this in the movie as well. If there weren’t…we’d just see that the title is pluralized and ask for Justine and Mike to be taken away in handcuffs immediately. There is an entire subplot of Kate’s porn career that plays out in a few ways. Obviously, there will be a moment when Charlotte discovers this and there is some drama. More importantly, a powerful producer is looking to get his prized star back in the fold. An investigator locates Kate in her new life…and contacts his employer before being dispatched by the unseen assailant. That thread hangs over the story…waiting to see if it will connect to anything.
So too does high school jock Corey (Sam Wexler), who discovers Kate’s alter-ego. Way too late, if I’m allowed to say so. For a supposedly famous porn star…Kate can walk around in total anonymity for way too long. Half the men in Michigan would pick her out of a crowd with how they described her career success to begin Stalkers. Corey is obsessed with Kate to the point of breaking into her house to have sex with his girlfriend. So, he’s on the list. For fun…let’s also add in the manager of the grocery store where Kate takes a minimum wage job and never bothers to show up at again. One of Stalkers many oddly started and ultimately meaningless story beats.
I can allow that there is a reason for…most…of these. Some of the odd plot choices will pay off during the climax of Stalkers. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a movie create suspects out of so many head scratching character choices…and perhaps I’m giving it too much credit by doing so. But it is, unfortunately, the most interesting thing about Stalkers. Wild logic gaps played out within a straightforward melodrama. The weird parts are entertaining. Not always for positive reasons.
Scare Value
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching Stalkers. It isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before. That’s not always for good reasons…but it’s different, nonetheless. There’s not much to say about the actual story or characters in Stalkers. Everything is overshadowed by the insane decision making by the characters and script itself. I did find the ending strangely satisfying. Which points to the fact that Stalkers is at its best the more it leans into its weird impulses.
