Novocaine (2025)

Directed by Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

Villains

For most of its running time Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s VILLAINS (2019, Shudder, AMC+, Prime, Hulu, Peacock, Tubi, Plex) is a nifty little horror comedy with four strong performances and an offbeat sense of humor. Then it suddenly asks us to care about characters at whom we’ve been invited to laugh. Yes, it’s another horror film that screws it on the dismount, a phrase I repeat because comments have encouraged me to do so and let that be a lesson to you.

Mickey (Bill Skarsgard) and Jules (Maika Monroe) are a pair of feckless young people who’ve decided to rob their way to their idea of heaven on Earth — Florida. When their car runs out of gas, they go looking for one to steal and stumble upon a charming little house in the woods. The first problem is that there’s a little girl (Blake Baumgartner) chained up in the basement. The second is that the owners are a pair of psychopaths (Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick) who decide to hold them prisoner and plan to kill them after the wife has had her way with Skarsgard.

The four main actors have their characters down pat. Even if the psychopathology doesn’t always make sense — their characters often seem like just an array of quirks designed to torment the younger couple — the actors invest in them whole-heartedly. When Donovan is going on about proper behavior, he seems utterly absurd, sporting a sliver of a mustache and an ascot. It takes an actor with a lot of grit to undermine his masculinity so completely. Even wilder is Sedgwick, a nightmare ‘50s housewife in desperate need of a child or maybe just some good sex. At one point she dons a short black wig, dresses in slinky black underwear and does a striptease while lip-synching Mallory Sands’ “Just Like the Big Girls Do,” and it’s a hoot. Monroe and Skarsgard are almost as loopy. The film opens with their attempt to rob a gas station as they bumble around in animal masks and try to figure out how to get the cash register open.