Twisted
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Starring: Djimon Hounsou, Lauren LaVera, Mia Healey, Gina Philips, Neal McDonough, Alicia Witt
Genre: Horror, Thriller
Runtime: 91 minutes
Darren Lynn Bousman’s Twisted has a solid premise at its core - Paloma (LaVera) and Smith (Healey), a pair of morally lacking thieves, spend their days executing a dubious house-flipping scheme and earning well from it. However, when one homeowner, Dr. Kezian (Hounsou), clocks onto the scheme, he isn’t going to let them get away with it. Oh, and also there’s a thread about his dead wife thrown into the mix too. Oh, the homeowner is also a world-renowned brain surgeon. Oh, the pair are also a lesbian couple, though this seems present more for some cheap titillation than anything else. There’s a lot happening in Twisted, but not a lot of sense. The film's conceptual ambition - a grimy mix of greed, obsession, and punishment - ultimately proves too heavy for its execution, causing the potential of it all to buckle.
"Twisted often pulls its punches and feels almost tentative at times. The gore, while present, rarely lingers and the horror is suggested rather than sustained, giving the whole thing a strangely cautious edge to material that seems primed for something far more vicious."
Twisted stumbles early on because everything presented to us is so thin. Paloma and Smith’s moral grey areas, which should be the heart of the film, are frustratingly underdeveloped and vague. We’re told enough to know that something wrong is happening, and the subsequent police investigation that is thrown in as a middling sideplot adds little to this, but the lack of details as to why Paloma and Smith operate like they do - along with their non-existent relationship - really undercuts the climax. When Dr. Kezian uncovers the scheme, the punishment feels wildly arbitrary given the situation and comes off as a little silly.
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Because the film maintains a certain distance from the characters, it never truly allows the audience to understand their emotional states. Twisted appears to presume audience investment, yet it fails to earn it because the characters' motivations are vague, and their backstories remain underdeveloped. Consequently, the horror elements function merely as striking visuals rather than delivering a genuine, impactful emotional punch.
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Despite this, Twisted finds its strength more in the character performances than development. As Paloma, Lauren LaVera again shows off her magnetic screen presence, despite a script that offers minimal insight into her character's backstory or emotions, she conveys both intensity and a hint of buried vulnerability. Paloma clearly has emotional depth beyond what the film explicitly provides, but alas, this is not something the film wants us to see. Djimon Hounsou attempts to inject proceedings with weight and authority as Dr. Kezian, but, again, the screenplay offers little to help him articulate this. He comes to life a little more in the third act, but, by then, the story has begun to derail itself.
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In terms of the film’s horror, several practical effects sequences are tactile, favouring physical distortions and icky, gooey visuals and textures over weightless CGI, and there’s a grimy, hands-on quality to some of the body horror that briefly injects urgency and much-needed tension in ways the script just does not.
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That said, though, the film feels restrained overall. Given Bousman’s CV - four Saw films and a few blood-soaked horror musicals, Twisted often pulls its punches and feels almost tentative at times. The gore, while present, rarely lingers and the horror is suggested rather than sustained, giving the whole thing a strangely cautious edge to material that seems primed for something far more vicious​
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In the end, Twisted is neither a collapse nor a triumph. In trying to juggle a morality tale about greed, a psychological thriller, a tragic love story on two fronts, and a mild torture flick, it ends up being a film of ideas at war with one another. Though the lead performances are solid, and there are great moments of effective practical craftsmanship, everything is ultimately undermined by narrative convolution and emotional distance. There's a sharper, more cohesive horror film hiding in here somewhere - maybe it’s in Kezian’s lair…
February 9th 2026