Push (2025) is written & directed by David Charbonier and Justin Douglas Powell. It stars Alicia Sanz, Raul Castillo, David Alexander Flinn, Gore Abrams, Justin Marcel McManus, Linc Hand, Shaan Sharma, Luke Barnett, and Cole Gleason. The film follows Natalie Flores (Sanz), a pregnant realtor who agrees to run an open house at an isolated, antique home. When a mysterious and unsettling stranger (Castillo) arrives for the tour, it quickly becomes clear that he has no intention of purchasing a home. Now pursued by a man who intends to kill her and her unborn child, Natalie’s situation becomes even more desperate when she learns that her assailant holds a deep understanding of the property’s many secrets. In this deadly game of cat & mouse, Natalie is forced to overcome her past trauma to survive.  

Sanz and Castillo give performances that mostly fall flat, but it’s tough to blame the actors when the material is this generic. Natalie is a character who, like so many other crappy horror movie protagonists of the last 2 decades, is vaguely forced to confront their past trauma through an arguably worse experience. This would be fine if the script had something insightful to say about the subject, but it just doesn’t. The character’s pregnancy gives the film a unique hook that feels distinct within the home invasion subgenre, but the script never finds interesting ways to take advantage of it. This initially adds a bit of tension, but mainly just works to slow Natalie down during the many generic chase sequences.

Castillo is occasionally threatening as the film’s villain, but the character is far too mysterious and therefore dull. I understand the choice to hide specific details about the character, but this script hides everything. This eliminates any opportunity for him to leave a mark. Besides being a killer, there’s almost nothing that defines him. Reveals in the last fifteen minutes do make the character a bit more interesting, but the film forgets about this information less than 10 minutes later. 

There’s a natural intensity to this setup, an open house being a smart way to force an interaction between two strangers. Unfortunately, these aspects of the setup are where the film’s originality ends. It spends more than half of its tight, 90-minute runtime watching Natalie slowly walk down dark, silent hallways until an inevitable, uninspired jump scare (if you can even call them that). For Pete’s sake, even the setting is as plain as they come. Let’s be honest, it’s pretty clear your film is struggling for ideas when one of the “highlights” of the third act is seeing our protagonist give unassisted birth while standing up, then proceed to chew through the umbilical cord. Maybe this is what the character meant later on when she delivers the hilariously terrible line, “All I had to do was… PUSH.” Really? We’re still doing the “dramatically namedrop the title without even a hint of irony” thing? 

Overall, this is easily the worst horror movie I’ve seen so far this year. The acting is flat, the script is lazy, and the direction is, putting it lightly, uninspired. Even audiences unfamiliar with the genre will be able to recognize that this isn’t a good film. It’s not necessarily silly, but it is soulless. In terms of film, I’d rather take ‘silly’ any day of the week. F