{"id":432949,"date":"2026-01-27T15:09:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/432949\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T15:09:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T15:09:13","slug":"rock-springs-review-history-is-a-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/432949\/","title":{"rendered":"Rock Springs Review – History is a Monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just as tension over immigration reaches a boiling point in our country, Two Sentence Horror Stories<\/a>\u2018 writer-director Vera Miao\u2018s sobering feature debut arrives to trace a grim but familiar line between America\u2019s violent past and present. Rock Springs explores over a century\u2019s worth of racial trauma through a Chinese-American family, though the historical horror here is monstrous in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

A surreal nightmare introduces Grace (Aria Kim), a young girl still grieving over the loss of her father. Her also grieving mom, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), relocates them along with Grace\u2019s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu) to the quaint Wyoming town of Rock Springs for a fresh start. The problem is that Emily, a Westernized adopted Vietnamese woman, isn\u2019t savvy about the Chinese customs that she\u2019d married into and dismisses Nai Nai\u2019s cautions of Ghost Month, a period in which the gates of hell are open. Their arrival awakens something monstrous from the town\u2019s horrific past, and it\u2019s lurking in the woods right behind their new home.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Photo by Rocks Springs LLC.<\/p>\n

Miao structures her feature debut into three parts, starting with Grace\u2019s perspective as she silently explores the area, seemingly a beacon for otherworldly horrors. This chapter establishes muted atmospherics and draws heavily from Hereditary in tone and horror mechanics, complete with almost dizzying upside-down shots overhead. The ghost of Emily\u2019s husband lingers in darkened corners, threatening her careful facade barely containing the sorrow she\u2019s been shielding from her remaining family, and it\u2019s only exacerbated by Grace\u2019s strange behavior.<\/p>\n

Yet Miao is almost too restrained in this first act, limiting details to recontextualize later with additional perspective shifts. An early scene of Grace eavesdropping on what she presumes to be her mother\u2019s stifled sobs behind closed doors is actually Emily attempting to choke back screams of terror when Rock Springs eventually shifts to her perspective. While the core family unit is fairly threadbare in characterization and background, outside of their shared mourning, the fraught mother\/daughter relationship provides the backbone that provides hope in an increasingly bleak endeavor.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because Rock Springs dramatically shifts gears in its middle section, changing tone and pace for a harrowing rewind to the town in 1885. It\u2019s the film\u2019s knockout centerpiece that sees a close-knit community of Chinese mine workers, most of whom have plans to return to their families back home, enjoying a day off, only to fall prey to one devastatingly cruel siege by the town\u2019s white miners. Benedict Wong adds heartbreaking complexity to Ah Tseng, a miner harboring a lot of unspoken pain and trauma, who warns his optimistic nephew (Ricky He) not to give himself so willingly to a hostile country that doesn\u2019t want him. It\u2019s a heavy foreshadowing of the gruesome violence on the immediate horizon.<\/p>\n

Cinematographer Heyjin Jun captures the ensuing massacre with unflinching immediacy, injecting the sleepy ghost story with a surprisingly visceral shot of adrenaline. Ah Tseng\u2019s helplessness is as devastating as the slaughter itself, and Miao doesn\u2019t hold back from depicting the gory cruelty, even making sure to note white women\u2019s complicity in racist evils.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kelly Marie Tran appears in Rock Springs by Vera Miao, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Rocks Springs LLC.<\/p>\n

History is indeed a vicious monster, with Miao pulling from the Rock Springs Massacre<\/a> to craft a Chinese-American ghost story exposing another dark corner of America\u2019s past. The strange fleshy beast teased in glimpses congeals for a full-blown creature feature third act that sounds way more interesting in concept than execution. Not helping is that the creature design isn\u2019t particularly, well, fleshed out, or easy to grasp in intent.<\/p>\n

In a film where the ghosts and skeletons in Rock Springs\u2019 closet are never as insidious as the cruelty that birthed them, the finale loses its edge as it rushes toward a superficial though no less poignant tribute to the forgotten.<\/p>\n

Rock Springs\u2018 narrative structure occasionally proves a bit unwieldy, struggling to bridge the underdeveloped personal family drama at the center to the larger, far more effective theme of racial trauma and horror. Miao executes her vision with clear purpose when it comes to the past, but leans too heavily on influences for the present.<\/p>\n

Emily\u2019s personal plight to keep her family together ultimately feels like a superficial means of relaying the true horror here, a historical tragedy that should\u2019ve served as a lesson, one that\u2019s painfully still necessary today.<\/p>\n

Rock Springs made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival<\/a>. Release info TBD.<\/p>\n

\"2.5<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just as tension over immigration reaches a boiling point in our country, Two Sentence Horror Stories\u2018 writer-director Vera…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[63633,88,205134,206,102052,132916,205135],"class_list":["post-432949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-benedict-wong","tag-entertainment","tag-kelly-marie-tran","tag-movies","tag-rock-springs","tag-sundance-2026","tag-vera-miao"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}