Parents' Guide to Unseen

This is a really good, if not great, horror movie. Unseen centers on two Asian American women who connect under traumatic circumstances as they both contend in their own ways with psychotic embodiments of White entitlement and privilege. The story itself works, and the suspense runs at a fever pitch once it gets going, suspense that encompasses the absurdities of trying to fix a slushy machine while working in a convenience store and the very real horror of murderous stalker ex-boyfriends and "Karens Gone Wild."

Where the movie falls a bit short is in the secondary characters. While the two leads come across as fully developed, likable characters, the villains are so over the top, it's depressing. It's depressing because it's hard to tell whether or not the actors are hamming up their roles or if it's too real. And when the "Karen character's" husband shows up, it's clear that they're doing a parody of the infamous St. Louis couple who stood in their front yards wielding assault rifles while a Black Lives Matter protest marched by. At this point, the whole art-mirroring-reality becomes grotesque and it offsets the humanity of the two main characters. Still, it's another solid effort by Blumhouse to make horror movies centered on races and ethnicities that have historically been marginalized in horror movies.