Darren Lynn Bousman's Twisted, released on digital VOD on February 6, 2026 by Republic Pictures, arrives as one of the more visually ambitious entries in the director's post-Saw career. Produced by Twisted Pictures and Envision Media Arts, this 99-minute horror thriller was written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, the screenwriting duo behind Steven Soderbergh's acclaimed psychological thriller Unsane. The film centers on Paloma, a seasoned con artist played by Lauren LaVera, who operates alongside her partner Smith, portrayed by Mia Healey. Together they target wealthy New Yorkers by posing as real estate agents and subletting luxury apartments they have no right to lease. Their scheme unravels catastrophically when they target the wrong mark: Dr. Robert Kezian, a distinguished neurosurgeon played by Djimon Hounsou, whose quiet grief over his late wife conceals a deeply disturbing obsession. The ensemble is rounded out by Neal McDonough, Alicia Witt, and Gina Philips.
Twisted matters as a reunion of sorts between the genre machinery Bousman helped build and a newer generation of horror performers, particularly LaVera, who broke out in the Terrifier franchise. The premise holds genuine promise, inverting the predator-prey dynamic in ways that echo recent standouts like Don't Breathe and Barbarian, while the screenplay's giallo-influenced ambitions suggest a more cerebral direction than Bousman's torture-centric work might imply. Whether the film delivers on those ambitions is, unfortunately, a more complicated story.
Story and Screenplay: A Clever Setup That Loses Its Way in Familiar Territory
The screenplay opens with Paloma's New York City operation running with practiced precision. She and Smith exploit the city's notoriously brutal rental market, seducing desperate tenants into paying for apartments that were never on the market. The film sketches this scheme with brisk efficiency rather than diving into the logistics, which is a reasonable creative choice since the mechanics wouldn't survive close scrutiny. The first act moves well, establishing Paloma's confidence and the intimate romantic bond between the two women before pivoting sharply when Kezian enters the picture. When Paloma survives a brutal assault thanks to the doctor's intervention, the dynamic flips: she has been saved by the wrong person, and the apartment she moved into becomes a very different kind of trap.
The screenplay's more interesting ambitions emerge in the second half. Kezian's obsession connects to what the film calls the Kidney Bean Theory: the idea that a tiny region of the brain contains the essence of selfhood, and that manipulating it could eliminate degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. His experiments on unwilling subjects are framed as grief-fueled madness married to institutional arrogance, a man convinced that a body count is an acceptable price for medical progress. Bernstein and Greer deserve credit for giving the villain philosophical scaffolding that distinguishes him from generic horror antagonists. The brain surgery sequences, developed with on-set neuroscience consultation, carry visceral weight because they feel grounded in procedural reality even when the circumstances are monstrous.
However, the script ultimately collapses under the weight of its competing ambitions. The central twist arrives far too early for viewers with any genre literacy, with foreshadowing so persistent and heavy-handed that the revelation feels less like discovery and more like confirmation of something already known. What should be a gasping moment lands with a shrug. The film also never resolves the tonal tug-of-war between erotic thriller, body horror, and morality play, cycling between modes without committing to any. The lesbian relationship between Paloma and Smith, presented through an early stretch of charged physical intimacy, fails to develop into genuine emotional stakes, leaving the third act's demand for audience investment in their bond feeling unearned. The NYPD detective subplot, involving Jacob Lukas Anderson and Gina Philips, remains largely decorative rather than dramatically integrated.
Acting and Characters: Performers Outpacing Their Material
Lauren LaVera carries the film on her shoulders and does so with impressive range. Best known for the physical and expressionistic demands of her Terrifier role, she demonstrates here that she can modulate down into something far more grounded and psychologically complex. Paloma is a performer by necessity, someone who constructs personas for every mark she encounters, and LaVera captures both the sharp professional control and the vulnerability beneath it. Even when the script traps Paloma in a largely reactive position as captive, LaVera keeps finding ways to signal intelligence and resourcefulness. She makes an intentionally difficult character compelling without softening the character's ethical edges, which is exactly the right call.
Djimon Hounsou anchors the antagonist role with the kind of restrained, internally driven performance that keeps Kezian from sliding into cartoon villainy. He plays a man whose grief has calcified into cold, clinical obsession, and the performance is most effective in quiet moments where sorrow and menace occupy the same expression simultaneously. Hounsou never raises his voice when a measured tone will do far more damage, and the accumulated effect is genuinely unsettling, particularly in the film's final act when the screenplay finally grants him room to escalate. Mia Healey makes a solid impression as Smith despite limited screen time, and Neal McDonough, in a brief but memorable appearance as a bureaucratic obstacle, adds a layer of institutional menace that contextualizes Kezian's isolation within a failing system.
The ensemble's collective problem is that the screenplay positions almost nobody as genuinely rootable. Paloma exploits vulnerable people for profit, Kezian commits atrocities in the name of science, and even the supporting figures serve primarily as plot mechanics rather than characters with interior lives. The darkest entries in the Saw franchise maintained at least one figure whose survival the audience actively wanted. Twisted declines to provide that anchor, which is a defensible creative decision but one that makes extended engagement demanding. The performers do everything they can with what they are given, and the film's moments of genuine power almost always trace directly back to what LaVera or Hounsou brings rather than what the script provides.
Direction and Technical Aspects: Bousman's Visual Confidence Versus His Editing Impulses
Bousman directs Twisted with the visual confidence of someone who has spent decades developing a specific horror grammar. His use of aspect ratio as a psychological tool is particularly striking: the film opens in a wider format suited to the cold transactional logic of Paloma's con work, then narrows progressively as the horror takes hold, with the frame itself closing in to mirror her shrinking agency. Dutch angles and disorienting camera movements increase in frequency as Kezian's obsession escalates, and the ticking-clock visual motif, a rotating camera movement echoing the hands of a clock, functions as a recurring reminder that control is slipping away from every character simultaneously. These are not accidental stylistic choices but coherent formal decisions.
Cinematographer Bella Gonzalez executes the giallo-influenced lighting scheme with committed artistry, flooding Kezian's secret lab with hyper-saturated purples, blues, and reds that feel borrowed from Dario Argento while finding their own identity within the specific emotional logic of the film. The cinematography evolves deliberately, beginning with sharp digital crispness and warping toward a blurrier, more compromised register as the narrative's ethical ground shifts beneath every character. The production design of Kezian's brownstone, particularly the hidden laboratory beneath it, creates a genuinely menacing space that Bousman exploits with intelligence, establishing geography early and then weaponizing familiarity as the situation deteriorates.
The editing is where the film stumbles most consistently. Bousman employs a music-video-style pace that denies the audience footholds during sequences that might benefit from sustained dread rather than kinetic cutting. There are moments where the rapid tempo works, particularly during the initial attack that redirects Paloma into Kezian's orbit. But applied across the entire film, the relentless pace prevents tension from properly accumulating. The film feels like it is always moving without building toward anything, which is a counterproductive quality in a slow-burn horror premise that requires the audience to feel genuinely trapped. The visual language is often smarter than the rhythm in which it is delivered.
Trailer Twisted (2026)
Music and Atmosphere: Classical Cruelty Against Body Horror
The score makes an immediate and deliberate tonal statement by pairing classical piano compositions with the film's most macabre imagery. The elegance of the music against the ugliness of what appears on screen functions as a sustained cruel joke, reinforcing the idea that Kezian views his experiments as artistic and even noble endeavors. This is an approach with genuine precedent in horror, and it works here because the contrast never softens the horror but instead amplifies it by suggesting the perpetrator's complete dissociation from the suffering he causes. The score's restraint during quieter scenes gives the more intense moments genuine sonic impact.
The overall atmosphere aims for a specific register that sits somewhere between erotic thriller and body horror, and Twisted mostly succeeds in establishing that uncomfortable tonal space during its first two acts. The sound design supports the clinical horror of the brain surgery sequences effectively, with procedural audio detail that makes the neuroscience feel grounded rather than fantastical. Where the atmosphere falters is in the tonal lurching of the screenplay, which periodically disrupts the mood the direction works hard to establish. Every time the film threatens to settle into genuine dread, a tonal shift or an editing decision breaks the spell. The result is a film that feels sporadically immersive rather than consistently suffocating, which is a missed opportunity given how effectively the visual and sonic components are individually constructed.
Strengths and Weaknesses
What Works Well:
- Lauren LaVera delivers her strongest genre performance to date, finding emotional range and psychological complexity beyond the Terrifier films.
- Djimon Hounsou gives the antagonist genuine depth and melancholy, grounding the horror in grief-soaked obsession rather than mere villainy.
- The giallo-influenced cinematography by Bella Gonzalez creates a vivid, hyper-saturated visual identity that distinguishes the film from standard genre offerings.
- Bousman's formal use of aspect ratio and camera movement as psychological tools shows genuine directorial intelligence.
- The classical score juxtaposed against body horror creates effective, sustained tonal dissonance.
- The efficient 99-minute runtime prevents the film from overstaying its welcome despite pacing issues.
What Does Not Work:
- The central twist is telegraphed so aggressively that genre-literate viewers will solve it long before the film acknowledges it. Music-video editing undermines tension by preventing dread from accumulating across sustained sequences.
- The lesbian relationship between Paloma and Smith is presented in ways that prioritize titillation over emotional authenticity, weakening the third act's demands for investment.
- The screenplay never commits strongly enough to any single genre mode, leaving the film feeling like a lesser version of several things simultaneously.
- No genuinely rootable character exists to anchor audience investment through the third act.
- The police detective subplot is dramatically inert, functioning as obstacle rather than meaningful narrative thread.
Final Verdict: Strong Craft and Committed Performances in Search of a Better Script
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Twisted earns 2.5 out of 5 stars as a technically accomplished but narratively frustrating horror thriller that consistently demonstrates the gap between potential and execution. The rating reflects a film where individual components reach toward something genuinely interesting while the assembled whole never coheres into the unsettling experience it aims for. Bousman's visual intelligence is on clear display, LaVera and Hounsou bring more than the script deserves, and the giallo-influenced aesthetic creates a distinctive screen identity that sets the film apart from generic genre output. These are real achievements. What prevents them from adding up to a recommendation without reservations is a screenplay that substitutes surface cleverness for genuine surprise, and editing choices that fragment tension rather than build it.
This film will reward viewers who prioritize visual style and committed performance over narrative sophistication. Fans of Darren Lynn Bousman's previous work will find his signature approach evolved toward more formally ambitious territory, and those tracking Lauren LaVera's career trajectory will find this a meaningful demonstration of range beyond the Terrifier universe. Horror audiences with a taste for giallo aesthetics, body horror, and morally complicated protagonists will find enough to engage with, particularly in the film's second half when Kezian's experiments move to the foreground. Those who appreciate villain-driven horror in which the antagonist possesses genuine philosophical underpinning rather than mere brutality will find Hounsou's performance alone worth the runtime. The film also functions as a reasonable double-feature companion to Don't Breathe or Barbarian for audiences interested in the home-invasion inversion subgenre.
Conversely, viewers who require sympathetic characters as emotional entry points will struggle to maintain investment across 99 minutes with nobody to root for without reservations. Those expecting narrative surprise or genuine genre innovation will find the predictable reveals deflating. Anyone sensitive to the gap between the film's treatment of its central relationship and what that relationship could have contributed dramatically may find the experience frustrating rather than merely imperfect. Twisted is emphatically not a bad film: it is a film with genuine strengths working at cross-purposes with genuine weaknesses, landing in that particular purgatory where what it achieves makes what it fails to achieve all the more apparent. Bousman continues to demonstrate that he has more to say as a filmmaker. The right script, handled with this level of visual ambition and this caliber of performer, would be something worth anticipating.
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