Panic Fest 2025 Coverage
The Only Ones review
The Only Ones tries something different…but ends up with a similar result.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Only Ones
Directed by Jordan Miller
Written by Jordan Miller
Starring Tatiana Nya Ford, Emily Classen, Paul Cottman, Zach Ruchkin, Cayla BereJikian, Jeb Aufiero and Nancy Anne Ridder
The Only Ones Review
People are constantly looking for the next new way to present a slasher story. Not all people, of course. Many are looking for the next public domain property with which to try and sell their basic, throwback slasher story. Ever since Scream redefined the genre almost 30 years ago, however…some people have been looking for that next big idea. We’ve had our share of success stories. Behind the Mask immediately comes to mind. Cabin in the Woods, The Final Girls and Happy Death Day are another few examples. Last year…In a Violent Nature’s attempt to flip perspective caused some stir. These films, many of them comedic in nature, understand why Scream succeeded in the first place. You can be funny…you can have meta-commentary…you can even change the point of view completely…but you have to respect the formula.
All those movies are bound to a standard slasher movie structure. Regardless of what creative concept they’ve layered on top of it…you recognize the story. No matter how much fun it’s having…it’s never having it at the expense of the slasher genre itself. Scream didn’t invent this, of course. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was pulling some of these tricks a full decade earlier. Tobe Hooper was doing it with the sequel to his own masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that same year. Wes Craven did so himself with his New Nightmare just two years prior. But Scream made a mark that the sixth Friday the 13th, the second Texas Chain Saw, and the seventh Nightmare never could. It resurrected the genre. Something that people have been waiting for the next idea to do once again.
The Only Ones follows all the right rules. It has a new idea, and it respects the formula. Those two things make what works in The Only Ones work. It’s an amiable attempt at a low budget slasher with something more going on under the hood. A breath of fresh air in the era of Mickey Mouse and Popeye slashers. At its best…it will hook you despite its shortcomings. Unfortunately, it doesn’t spend a lot of time at its best.
The slasher structure is fully in place. A group of friends head to a remote cabin…ignoring the warning signs along the way. They begin to drop one by one…assuming that there is someone out there in the darkness picking them off. The tropes you expect are all firmly situated. In The Only Ones, however…there is no one out there. At least, not for most of the bloody rampage. This is a slasher movie born out of a big misunderstanding.
It’s a clever concept. There is, at some points, a person outside who means the group harm. They have good reasons for it, mind you. But The Only Ones isn’t a movie about getting to the bottom of what’s going on. It’s a story about surviving something that mostly isn’t. In its best moments…the survivors sit in their fortified house…desperate to survive the night…while we know that there is nothing out there. It’s a high peak for a movie that spends most of its time stuck in a lower gear.
The biggest issue here is that the movie needed to be funnier. The situation is both heightened and ridiculous…but it rarely feels like either. Characters are mostly unmemorable…though some of their deaths work well. Infusing some winking or knowing comedic beats into what, from our perspective, is a funny situation would have brought things in The Only Ones to a more appropriate tone. It has its moments. They only reinforce how much better more of those moments would have made things.
There’s definitely something here. Especially for anyone exhausted with the current state of low budget slasher movies. At its best there are some very entertaining moments to be found. The total package, however, leaves The Only Ones as an interesting concept that is capitalized on far too infrequently.
Scare Value
With points for originality…The Only Ones does reach peak moments of slasher movie nirvana. Bodies pile up despite there not actually being a masked killer on the loose. The concept is wonderful…the execution…not quite. Still, there is something to take away from the effort. Things become so beautifully screwed up through misunderstanding that it feels like anything can happen. And it often does.
