After its UK screening at FrightFest 2025, I’ve long wanted to revisit Redux Redux, the follow-up to Kevin and Matthew McManus’s lo-fi horror The Block Island Sound. That movie felt like something a few friends could knock together in their local community — a modern regional horror piece pitched far more compellingly than its schlocky 1970s and 80s predecessors. Redux Redux, by comparison, is a huge step up in tone, delivery, and concept, with an impeccable feel that recalls the early Terminator saga.
A few years back, you couldn’t move for multiverses. Marvel peddled one as part of some convoluted completionist exercise; the Daniel’s gave us the absurdist Oscar darling Everything Everywhere All at Once. What unified them was their use of the multiverse to present bizarre visions of reality. The McManuses’ vision is deceptively pragmatic: every reality is basically the same, save for the smallest interpersonal details shifting from one to the next. All except one. In a single reality, they’ve discovered multiversal and makes these jumps through brutalist mechanical devices. And it’s through the owner of one such device that we get our story. Irene (Michaela McManus, their sister) travels through every universe looking for one where her daughter wasn’t brutally killed by Neville (Jeremy Holm). She fails in each, forcing her instead to kill Neville over and over again — hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It’s revenge at a level never previously pitched.
Hearing that, you’d think it gloried in bloody-minded vengeance. It doesn’t. While there’s action, the McManuses pitch this at an emotional level by examining the cost to Irene. To pursue revenge to such an extreme and never find satisfaction takes a toll. To stay sane, she clings to routines: dropping in on Jonathan (Jim Cummings) for drinks and casual sex (though can it be called casual when she does it in countless realities?), and conversations with the waitress at the diner where Neville works. She grasps anything to feel human — until one reality throws a curveball: fellow victim Mia (Stella Marcus), minutes from Neville’s inevitable killer embrace. Here the Terminator comparisons crystallise, with the pair embarking on a sci-fi road trip: a teenager and her unfeeling machine. Only here, the machine’s apathy was more self-inflicted than programmed.
Both utterly broken — Mia abandoned by the system, Irene trapped in an endless death cycle — they eventually find connection. That’s the emotional core: two women finding space in their hearts for one another. It takes time. Mia is a fearless firebrand who acts without thinking and the previously numb Irene rediscovers feelings she thought were destroyed by her campaign of chaos.
Both utterly broken, they eventually find connection. That’s the emotional core: two women finding space in their hearts for one another.
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This is my one major script issue. On one hand, Kevin and Matthew give their sister Michaela and Stella Marcus complex, layered roles rarely afforded to female actors in genre cinema. On the other, there are a few too many moments where the script explains emotional states rather than showing them. Exposition about brokenness will never be as effective as seeing their emotional fragility in action. While it happens twice, it isn’t damaging enough to diminish Mia’s raw nerve or Irene’s reawakening. To further minimise any critical issues potential caused by such exposition, these threads culminate in a scene affirming Irene’s feelings for Mia, and it is genuinely powerful stuff.
Some may view Neville as a flaw — not his performance (he’s terrifying), but his lack of substance. We don’t know why he kills; we just know he does, compelled endlessly across the multiverse. In defence of Redux Redux, this isn’t the movie for humanising such inhumanity. We’re hundreds of kills past that point. Rather, it questions the adage to an absurd degree: that those who pursue revenge should dig two graves— one for their victim, one for themselves.
While it doesn’t match Terminator‘s bombast, there’s plenty to enjoy on the action front. The lack of blockbuster budget never hinders staging with the set-pieces displaying a brilliant economy. The micro kill sequences between Irene and Neville and the more patient sequences showcase true physicality from McManus and Marcus. Two sequences stand out. The first sees Irene shoot Neville in broad daylight before fleeing police. That shrewdly edited sequence gives the movie a dirty, lived-in reality. Nothing removes me from an action sequence faster than editing that makes an actor look more physically impressive than they are; credit where due, nothing of the sort happens here. It’s all on Michaela McManus, and she is glorious under the pressure. The same applies to Marcus in the replacement battery scene; similarly, both go through the ringer in the full-throttle, knife-edged finale.
This was one of my favourite new movies of 2025, and now to see it out in the wild is very rewarding. Where it ranks for 2026, now it’s out, only time will tell. Its interpersonal dynamics, pragmatic sci-fi, and multiversal storytelling that democratises a trope usually dominated by hyper-spectacles. Sure, some of it is clumsily written, but given how much is done with so little, it’s hard not to walk away impressed. It’s just a shame it isn’t getting a UK big-screen release. Alan Gwizdowski’s timeless cinematography, capturing California’s oppressive, abandoned expanses, just hits differently on a big screen.
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