Rod Blackhurst creates his own icon with this love-letter horror classics
Sometimes a filmmakers inspirations are laid on all too heavy, masking their own talents or ideas. In other instances they marry homages in a way that crafts a wonderful companion piece. Dolly is thankfully the latter, the latest from Rod Blackhurst (Amanda Knox, Night Swim) that serves a grimy love letter to the sun-bleached psycho-terror of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, along with an embrace of the psychological cruelty of New French Extremity.
Fabianne Therese (Southbound) plays Macy, a young woman snatched from a hiking trip and dropped into a twisted domestic fantasy, where a hulking, masked figure (Dolly, played with exuberant menace by pro-wrestler Max the Impaler) aims to raise her as a child in their grotesque dollhouse. She wakes in a decaying house dressed in lace, silk, and trauma, surrounded by dolls, doilies, and a chilling pantomime of “care.” What follows is less an outright gore-fest than a psychological unraveling. Yes, there are blood-soaked sequences and bone-snapping practical effects as Therese endures her captivity and vies for her freedom, but Blackhurst wisely leans into dread over shock. The film isn’t afraid to be overt with its themes of delusion, survival, and twisted nurture, burrowing them under your skin.
Though set in the present day (cell phones and all), the film is cloaked in the weathered aesthetic of a bygone era, complete with fly-covered interiors, analog radios, and cars that feel pulled from the past. Dolly is a modern day horror that wears the skin of a grungier era. The opening sets the stage with the perfect visual cue. From under the bed, we watch a door creak open as a deformed foot slinks into frame, an image both uncanny and arresting. Blood-red titles smear across a pitch-black screen, setting a nightmarish tone, underscored by the contrasting sounds of nursery rhymes and the chime of a child’s music box echoing in the background. The leafy surrounds echo the primal tone of the film, while the score adds another layer of discordancy.
The film, scripted by Blackhurst alongside Brandon Weavil, divides itself into titled chapters, each a descent deeper into blood and madness. There’s an almost ceremonial rhythm to its violence, mass grave ringed with dolls, haunting POVs from ground-level, and the crunch of a spade slicing into earth and flesh. As Macy strategizes her way to survival, the film taps into primal instincts, fight, flight, and the unbearable weight of being someone’s twisted “child.” Therese is an empathetic figure to root for, while Sean William Scott adds an effective “punching bag” for the film as Macy’s husband Chase. Ethan Suplee’s Tobe rounds out a small but committed cast, as a character that opens up a whole host of possibilities for a prequel or sequel, something alluded to in the film’s Q&A.
For the Drafthouse faithful, Dolly feels like something destined to screen at a future Terror Tuesday. It impresses with it’s practical effects, grungy aesthetic, ability to channel its influences without falling into lazy pastiche, and building up its own iconography. There’s just something gratifying about getting a horror film that knows what it is, and what it wants to be, no pretension, just potency. Dolly is a lean and mean entry to the horror genre that more than holds it’s own against its forebears.
