{"id":620593,"date":"2026-09-10T17:40:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T17:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/620593\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T17:40:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T17:40:11","slug":"river-slasher-elevated-by-jane-levy-and-jessica-rothe-performances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/620593\/","title":{"rendered":"‘River’: Slasher Elevated by Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe Performances"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn Joshua Giuliano<\/a>\u2019s debut feature \u201cRiver<\/a>,\u201d the line between beauty and carnage is razor thin.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe slasher film, set to premiere Sept. 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival, concerns a trio of siblings (Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe and Max Mattern) who, after a tense reunion, take their father\u2019s boat downriver in order to spread his ashes. But after they spot a masked man staring at them from the shore, things go bad quickly.<\/p>\n

\n\tWithout spoiling the often jaw-dropping twists, Giuliano, who both wrote and directed the feature, has made a must-see film for genre fans. Finding a taut balance between echoing the beats of classic slashers and intentionally subverting expectations, it\u2019s evocative of some of his favorite \u201970s films, like \u201cThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre\u201d and \u201cHalloween,\u201d without feeling redundant.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI wanted to make the kind of slasher film that I wanted to see,\u201d Giuliano says. \u201cSomething that was stripped down to its core elements. For me, slasher films at their very essence are simple and primal. It\u2019s about a cast of human characters being hunted down by a killer. It\u2019s about the relentlessness of death, the pursuit of death, sometimes the inevitability of death. Even if they\u2019re sequels, the killer dies and they always come back because death never stops. To me, that\u2019s a terrifying concept.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd who better to sell the horror than Levy and Rothe, who cemented their Scream Queen bona fides with 2013\u2019s \u201cEvil Dead\u201d and 2017\u2019s \u201cHappy Death Day,\u201d respectively. Playing estranged siblings gave the actresses an opportunity to clash and add tension to the story before the bloodshed began.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThroughout the film, there\u2019s a lot of times when they\u2019re polar opposites of each other,\u201d Giuliano says. \u201cBut having seen their previous work, I knew that when the time came for them to deconstruct all that personality stuff and just get feral, they both could do that in spades. It\u2019s also an incredibly satisfying moment when that happens in the film, because you see two completely different sisters bonding over their shared ferociousness, which is a really fun thing to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond the actors, the film is filled with warm shots of the environment, as well as inventive use of light, shadows and color. Giuliano says he and his cinematographer mined films like Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s \u201cStalker\u201d and Peter Weir\u2019s \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock\u201d for inspiration.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe guiding principle for Nick Matthews, my DP, and I was to create this feeling of dissonance by couching these incredibly brutal moments within the most beautiful setting imaginable,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen the audience is seeing something as beautiful as the setting that West Virginia gave us, but then witnessing these horrendous acts happening in the same exact frame, it unmoors them a little bit. The best horror doesn\u2019t tell the audience how to feel, it shows them contradictory things in the same frame. If you expose them in that way, they are left to fend for themselves and wonder how they actually feel about what they\u2019re seeing. We wanted to create a beautiful, brutal film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso at top of mind was the film\u2019s sound design, which is deliberately used as another tool to make the audience feel frightened and uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat you don\u2019t see is often scarier than what you do,\u201d Giuliano says. \u201cSound is a loophole and a way to get around that. What you can hear, even if you don\u2019t see it, and what the audience imagines is usually infinitely more horrifying than what you can show them. So sound was a way for us to access the audience\u2019s collective imagination. Each individual in the audience can project their own thing onto the screen when we\u2019re not showing something, but we\u2019re hearing it. It\u2019s a way to get the audience to participate and interact with the film. They\u2019re not just sitting there and watching.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite his precision in creating \u201cRiver,\u201d Giuliano ultimately sees it as a back-to-basics project.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou only need three key ingredients: a cast of characters that you care about, put them in an interesting location and then give them a terrifying villain,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to, as sincerely as possible, attempt to scare the audience by using these very minimal ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSee exclusive first-look images from \u201cRiver\u201d above and below.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Joshua Giuliano\u2019s debut feature \u201cRiver,\u201d the line between beauty and carnage is razor thin. The slasher film,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,263490,270,13480,1745],"class_list":["post-620593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-joshua-giuliano","tag-movies","tag-river","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}