Scream

Twenty-six years after Wes Craven’s original, Ghostface is back in Woodsboro. This fifth Scream, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett from a script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, is a decent slasher with a first-rate opening, kills nasty enough to earn its 18 certificate, and one performance that caught us off guard. It is also a film that stops every ten minutes to tell you what kind of film it is, and by the second hour we had heard enough.

The opening is the best thing in it. Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) is alone in a large suburban kitchen when the house phone rings, and the voice on the line asks her favourite scary film. She says she prefers the sort of horror that has themes and names The Babadook, and we laughed, because the film knows exactly which of its viewers it is teasing. Then the voice starts describing her house, the front door locks itself, and we stopped laughing. Brett Jutkiewicz shoots the house in warm lamplight with the dark held just outside the glass, and the attack, when it comes, is long, close and ugly.

Then the film starts talking. Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), Tara’s estranged older sister, comes back to town with her boyfriend Richie Kirsch (Jack Quaid), and Tara’s friends gather to work out who wants them dead. Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown), the group’s film obsessive, lays out the rules: this is a requel, not a sequel or a reboot, and the killer will go after anyone connected to the murders of 1996. It is a good speech, and it is also the studio explaining why it made the film. Vanderbilt and Busick return to the idea again and again, with jokes about angry fans and the film-within-the-film Stab, and each time it is a little less funny. Around the hour mark we stopped enjoying the joke and started waiting for the next knife.

The new cast is uneven. Ortega is the find: she spends most of the film in a hospital bed and still makes Tara the one person we worried about. Barrera has the harder job, a heroine with a secret she cannot say out loud, and she plays it as a single note of clenched anxiety the script never lets her vary. Mason Gooding, as Mindy’s twin Chad, and Mikey Madison, as Amber, the friend Tara was texting when the phone rang, get a trait each and not much more. Dylan Minnette’s Wes gets one long sequence in a kitchen, built from open doors and a running shower, that is the film’s best piece of staging.

David Arquette is the surprise. Dewey Riley has left the sheriff’s office and lives alone in a trailer with a drink to hand, watching Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) present breakfast television from a long way off, and Arquette plays him without any of the old comedy: a man stabbed too many times for too little thanks, and aware of it. When Sam turns up asking for help and he tells her to get out of town, we felt something we had not expected from this series, which was sadness. Sidney Prescott arrives late, calm and capable, and the film gives her little to do except be Sidney Prescott.

The killing is done properly. Ghostface has always been a clumsy murderer, tripping over furniture and taking kicks to the head, and the directors keep that, but the knife goes in more often and deeper than before, and Michel Aller holds on the wounds where an earlier film would have cut away. Chad Keith gives Woodsboro open-plan kitchens and glass doors, every room with three ways in. Brian Tyler and Boys Noize put an electronic pulse under the orchestral stabs, and it does its job without our noticing, which for a slasher is praise.

Craven’s film was sharp about the rules because it was also frightened of them; the jokes came from people who thought they might die anyway. This one is sharper and less frightened. See it in a cinema if you can, with a crowd that shouts at the screen; at home the kills still land but the speeches land harder, and you will find yourself answering back. Bring someone who has seen the first four. It runs 114 minutes and carries an 18.