Seeing Sidney Prescott on screen again should feel like coming home. Nearly thirty years after Woodsboro first turned her into horror’s most resilient survivor, Neve Campbell slips back into the role with the kind of quiet authority that reminds you why Sidney became the blueprint for the modern final girl.
Franchise architect Kevin Williamson directs from a script he co-wrote with Guy Busick. On paper, that creative reunion promises a sharp, self-aware revival. In execution, it delivers something far messier, this is a sequel that leans heavily on legacy while struggling to justify the need for its existence.
Sidney has traded Woodsboro for the postcard calm of Pine Grove, raising her daughter Tatum (Isabel May) with husband Mark (Joel McHale). The domestic calm is, of course, temporary. When Ghostface resurfaces and circles Tatum’s inner orbit — Chloe (Celeste O’Connor), Hannah (McKenna Grace, criminally underused), Ben (Sam Rechner), and Lucas (Asa Germann) — the film gestures toward an intriguing idea: what does generational trauma look like when the monster comes for your child instead of you?
It’s a rich premise, and the film occasionally taps into it. The scenes between Sidney and Tatum have a lived-in tension that suggests a smarter, more intimate story fighting to break through. Campbell grounds it all with a performance that feels bruised but unbroken.
Around her, though, the movie wobbles. The new ensemble exists largely to be shuffled between suspect and victim, with little sense that they understand — or even particularly care about — the mythology they’ve inherited. The tonal whiplash is jarring: grisly, well-staged kills give way to sudsy melodrama and then to meta commentary that lacks the mischievous precision that once defined the series. It often feels less like a cohesive film and more like a franchise argument happening in real time.
Even the legacy players are shortchanged. Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) drifts in and out without impact, while the heavily teased return of Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) lands with a thud — more a wink at the audience than an organic development.
There are sparks here and there: a nerve-shredding opener, a handful of creatively brutal set pieces, flashes of tension that recall the series at its sharpest. But the edge that once made these films dangerous has dulled. What remains is a sequel caught between honoring its past and reinventing itself, accomplishing neither with conviction.
There’s a decent story buried somewhere inside Scream 7. But between its uneven tone, strange pacing, and reliance on resurrecting ghosts rather than developing the living, this is a sequel that feels more exhausted than evolved. The franchise deserves better than this half-baked attempt at reinvention. Plus, we actually liked Melissa Barrera — so just bring her back already.
