Psycho Killer (2026) Movie Review: A Promising Premise Squandered by Incoherent Plotting and Flat Execution

Psycho Killer is a 2026 crime-horror-thriller directed by Gavin Polone in his feature directorial debut, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, the screenwriter behind Se7en. Produced by 20th Century Studios, Constantin Film, and New Regency Productions, the film stars Georgina Campbell as Jane Archer, a Kansas state trooper who launches a personal investigation after her husband is shot dead by a serial killer during a routine traffic stop. James Preston Rogers plays the hulking masked antagonist known as the Satanic Slasher, with Malcolm McDowell, Logan Miller, and Aaron Merke in supporting roles. The film is distributed theatrically in the United States by 20th Century Studios, with a release date of February 20, 2026.

The pedigree behind Psycho Killer should, on paper, have produced something at least competently menacing. Walker's Se7en remains one of the defining serial killer films of the 1990s, and Polone has produced a string of commercially successful genre films including Zombieland, Panic Room, and Stir of Echoes. The pairing suggested a project with genuine teeth. Instead, what has emerged is a film with a notably troubled production history, reportedly shot in 2023, rated in 2024, and released in 2026 with no advance press screenings, bearing all the marks of extensive post-production intervention. The result is a serial killer thriller that achieves something genuinely rare: it manages to be boring, incoherent, and unscary in equal measure across a merciful 92 minutes.

Story and Screenplay: A Script That Raises Ideas Only to Immediately Abandon Them

Walker's screenplay opens with genuine promise. A wintry Kansas highway, a routine traffic stop, a patrolman's death witnessed by his wife. The scene is spare and efficiently executed, establishing the kind of stark, lonely American geography that gave Se7en much of its atmosphere. Jane Archer's motivation is immediate and sympathetic, and the killer's introduction carries enough visual menace to suggest a functioning genre film might follow. For approximately fifteen minutes, Psycho Killer operates as intended. Then the screenplay begins dismantling itself with an efficiency that is almost impressive.

The central problem is a script that introduces ideas with apparent purpose and then simply walks away from them. Jane discovers she is pregnant, a detail that generates some brief internal conflict before being entirely forgotten when she is thrown through a motel window several scenes later. A prescription drug addiction gives the killer a potentially interesting dependency that is never developed or paid off. The timeline of the story is deliberately hazy, mixing surveillance cameras and cell phones with paper road maps and classified ads, the latter forming the basis of a cipher subplot that constitutes the film's only gesture toward actual detective work. This chronological vagueness seems designed to obscure how dated some of the screenplay's conceits are, given that the script reportedly dates back nearly two decades and was originally conceived for a 2009 production. The anachronisms do not feel period-specific. They simply feel like a script that time has not been kind to.

The plotting becomes progressively more unmoored as the film advances. Jane's ability to locate a serial killer who has evaded the combined resources of the FBI and multiple state police forces by conducting a few internet searches stretches plausibility past the breaking point. The Satanic Slasher's cult connections, centered on Malcolm McDowell's Mr. Pendleton and a community of true believers who apparently split their time between ritual feasting on Chinese takeout and holding blood orgies, raises the possibility of social satire about extremism and organized religion before the script confirms it has nothing to say on either subject. A late-film connection to the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster arrives as if parachuted in from a different movie entirely, and the finale departs so completely from the tone of the opening that the film feels like two unrelated projects stitched together in the editing room.

Acting and Characters: Campbell Does Her Best With a Character Written as an Empty Vessel

Georgina Campbell (Cold Storage) is a genuinely capable performer, as she demonstrated in Barbarian, and the film's greatest single failure may be what it does to her. Jane Archer is not a character. She is a collection of genre-function notations: grieving wife, determined pursuer, pregnant woman whose pregnancy becomes inconvenient to the plot and disappears accordingly. There are no personal quirks, no specific professional traits, no emotional texture beneath the stated motivation of vengeance. Campbell plays Jane with evident commitment, projecting a determination that the script never substantiates with any interiority worth discovering. That she makes the character watchable at all is a function of her natural screen presence rather than anything the material provides.

James Preston Rogers's Satanic Slasher is a significant obstacle to the film's effectiveness as a horror thriller, and the issue is primarily one of directorial strategy. Polone exposes his villain so extensively and so early that the mystery and menace that should accumulate over the course of the film instead deflates. The rubber mask and the voice, which lands somewhere between a budget Bane impression and a Saturday morning cartoon villain, require the surrounding atmosphere to compensate for their inherent campiness. No such atmospheric compensation arrives. What remains is a large man in a silly disguise doing evil things in well-lit spaces, and the effect is deflating rather than frightening. Malcolm McDowell, occupying the screen for approximately five minutes, makes the most of his cult leader role with the experienced showmanship of someone who knows exactly what kind of film he is in. Logan Miller injects genuine warmth and humor into a small supporting role that briefly, tantalizing suggests how much more entertaining this film might have been had it committed to its camp potential.

The supporting ensemble is uniformly saddled with thin writing and asked to do very little beyond occupying space in scenes that require their presence. FBI agents exist to antagonize Jane bureaucratically. Cult members exist to be killed. A friendly female FBI agent exists to provide Jane access she could not logically acquire independently. Nobody in Psycho Killer feels like a person who existed before the scene requiring them began, and none of them will exist in the audience's memory after the credits roll.

Direction and Technical Aspects: A Producer Who Discovers That Producing and Directing Are Different Skills

Polone's direction reveals the gap between knowing what makes a good film and knowing how to make one. He clearly understands genre filmmaking intellectually: he has produced enough of it to know the vocabulary. But understanding a language and speaking it fluently are different things, and Psycho Killer struggles at the level of basic execution throughout. The film's opening setpiece is its best-directed sequence, using rural Kansas locations with a genuine eye for desolate atmosphere and composing the highway murder with enough restraint to generate actual unease. That competence does not survive contact with the more complex material that follows.

The CGI blood effects are egregiously poor for a major studio production, registering as digitally generated splatter that undermines every kill sequence it appears in. The practical production design, particularly the neon-red Satanic Panic aesthetics and the cult headquarters, shows more visual imagination than most of the film's photography, suggesting a design team operating above the directorial vision surrounding them. Polone has a reasonable eye for rural locations and a good instinct for the visual grammar of isolation, but he loses control of tone completely once the narrative moves into cult territory, unable to decide whether the film is playing its satanic elements straight or sending them up, and consequently achieving neither.

The editing, which a closing credit reveals involved additional work by Kevin Greutert of the Saw franchise, bears the unmistakable marks of a film that underwent significant restructuring in post-production. Scenes end abruptly. Plot threads appear and vanish without resolution. The film's pacing is uneven in ways that suggest material was removed rather than trimmed, leaving gaps where dramatic connective tissue once existed. The result is a film that lurches from sequence to sequence without the accumulated tension a thriller requires, arriving at its climax without having earned any of the stakes it demands the audience feel.

Music and Atmosphere: Sound Design Choices That Compound Rather Than Compensate

The sound design makes curious choices that compound the film's atmospheric problems. The Satanic Slasher's footsteps have been processed to resonate with an elephantine weight that is consistent regardless of what surface he is actually walking on, a choice that might function as stylization in a more self-aware film but here registers as a technical decision nobody questioned. The overall sonic atmosphere of the film is generic, cycling through the familiar textures of the mid-budget horror thriller without finding any distinctive quality to distinguish itself from the genre's default settings.

The film's relationship to its own title is symptomatic of its broader failure of nerve. The Talking Heads song after which the film is named does not appear on the soundtrack. Whether this reflects a licensing decision or a deliberate choice, the absence is notable. The song's wiry, anxious energy and its first-person serial killer perspective would have provided the film with exactly the kind of tonal anchor it lacks: something that understood its own premise well enough to wink at it. Instead, Psycho Killer proceeds with a stone-faced seriousness about material that keeps sliding toward accidental comedy, generating a mismatch between the film's self-image and what the audience is actually watching.

Trailer Psycho Killer (2026)

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• The opening highway setpiece is effectively directed, using rural Kansas geography to generate genuine atmosphere and establishing the film's premise with economical clarity.
• Georgina Campbell brings professional commitment and natural screen presence to a role the script has given nothing to work with.
• Logan Miller's brief supporting performance injects welcome humor and warmth that briefly suggests a more entertaining film.
• The production design's Satanic Panic aesthetic shows visual imagination, particularly in the neon-red lighting choices.
• Malcolm McDowell extracts full value from his limited screen time with characteristic showmanship.

What doesn't work:

• The screenplay introduces plot elements, Jane's pregnancy, the killer's drug addiction, the Three Mile Island connection, and abandons all of them without resolution or consequence.
• The CGI blood effects are unacceptably poor for a major studio production, undermining every kill sequence in the film.
• Overexposure of the villain through his silly mask, processed voice, and excessive screen time systematically destroys whatever menace he might have generated.
• The film's tonal inconsistency is never resolved: it cannot commit to either straight horror or self-aware camp, producing something tonally adrift throughout.
• The editing bears visible signs of post-production restructuring, leaving the narrative disjointed and the pacing uneven.
• Jane Archer has no interior life, no distinguishing characteristics, and no arc beyond the stated mission of revenge.
• The film arrives at a climax wildly disproportionate to everything that precedes it, suggesting significant alterations to the original script during production.

Final Verdict: A Thriller That Generates Neither Thrills Nor Chills

Rating: 2/10

Psycho Killer earns its 2 out of 10 rating as a film that squanders a legitimate premise, a capable lead, and a credentialed screenwriter through directorial inexperience, a deeply compromised editing process, and a fundamental failure to understand what makes a serial killer thriller work. The 2-star rating acknowledges the effective opening sequence and Campbell's committed performance while being honest about the fact that a film this incoherent, this tonally rudderless, and this consistently unscary has failed in the most fundamental ways available to its genre.

Horror and thriller enthusiasts who have a genuine appetite for mid-budget genre cinema may find the cult-house sequences and McDowell's brief appearance worth a streaming watch at some future point, with appropriately calibrated expectations. Fans of Georgina Campbell who want to see what she can do in a more functional vehicle should seek out Barbarian instead. Anyone curious about Andrew Kevin Walker's screenwriting work should return to Se7en, which this film's existence makes even more impressive by contrast.

Anyone hoping for genuine chills, coherent plotting, a satisfying cat-and-mouse structure, or any of the other basic satisfactions the genre promises should look elsewhere without hesitation. Psycho Killer's most honest achievement is demonstrating that the combination of a talented screenwriter and an experienced producer does not automatically produce a competent director, and that a script can be developed for two decades and still arrive at the screen with its most fundamental problems unsolved. It is, to borrow from the film's own vocabulary, a crime scene. Just not an interesting one.

Psycho Killer is released theatrically in the United States by 20th Century Studios on February 20, 2026. Language: English. Runtime: 92 minutes. Rating: R.