Horror Streams, Itziar Acts: The Screen Has Notes
The Evil Dead comparison is accurate enough to be useful: this is a film that understands visceral filmmaking is architectural.
There is a horror film currently doing quiet, persistent damage on HBO Max, and it arrived the way the best horror always does — not with a campaign, not with discourse, just with word of mouth spreading like something organic and slightly alarming. The Evil Dead comparison is accurate enough to be useful: this is a film that understands visceral filmmaking is architectural. You build the room, you seal the exits, then you see what the characters are made of. Box office success is one thing. Streaming is where a horror film either becomes mythology or dissolves into the algorithm. This one is becoming mythology, and you can feel the difference.
Meanwhile, the conversation that actually interested me this week was about *Numana*, the incoming sci-fi drama series that has just locked in Itziar Ituño and Vito Sanz. If you only know Ituño as Lisbon from *Money Heist*, that is understandable and also slightly limiting — she has a quality on screen that the heist format could never fully use, a stillness that reads as either grief or threat depending on the light. A dystopian series is a better architecture for that. Sanz is interesting casting beside her. The project is Argentinian-created, which means the dystopia is probably not metaphorical. I am watching this development with the kind of attention I usually save for a second episode.
The other thing worth noting: *Toy Story 5* is holding the top spot at the U.K. and Ireland box office for a third consecutive frame, and I find myself with no strong feelings about this in either direction. Pixar at its best is devastating. Pixar making sequels to sequels is something else — a brand performing memory at you, betting correctly that you will pay for the feeling without requiring the substance. It works. It always works. That is the part that stays with me.
And the Iranian documentary *An Eye for an Eye* — about a woman who killed her husband in self-defence — has secured an Oscar-qualifying U.S. release, which matters beyond the award circuit. Films like this don't need a trophy. They need a room. They need to be seen. The fact that it's getting the distribution mechanism to make that happen is the only news that actually landed this week with any moral weight.
The screen is never just entertainment. It is always, underneath, a negotiation about what we are willing to look at.
