[Film Review] Revealer (2022)

Late 20th century nostalgia is big in horror right now. From the smash success of Stranger Things to the Fear Street trilogy, 80s and 90s horror is being celebrated by creators the world over (and, okay, also a lot by streaming platforms like Netflix).

It’s only natural that we’d begin seeing smaller outlets get in on this fun vintage trend. Enter Revealer, a Shudder exclusive coming to the app this summer. It takes place in Chicago in the 80s, and plays not only with appropriate visuals and character design, but with the theme of the Satanic Panic that gripped certain evangelical parts of the nation during the time. And it largely succeeds in its goals, keeping a practical eye toward what it can reasonably do as a film. Revealer is a fun romp that doesn’t overreach its practical constraints, though it gets a little thin on story.

In terms of plot, the conceit is a good one: a stripper and a prudish anti-sex work protestor are trapped together inside a peep show booth when the Biblical apocalypse from the Book of Revelation strikes. It’s a simple idea, but one that has potential and allows for the plot to be driven by the interplay of the two characters instead of a VFX monster that would eat up the budget. Which is exactly what ends up happening – the archetypal characters bounce off each other so well that it’s easy to forget that most of the film takes place in fairly uniform underground tunnels. The character dynamism engages the audience to offset the lack of visual dynamics in the latter half of the film. 

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Speaking of which, the acting here goes a long way to carry this film, as it sort of must. There are only six characters in the entire film, and four of them are essentially cameos. The two main characters, Angie (played by Caito Aase) and Sally (played by Shaina Schrooten) spend almost the entirety of the film’s eighty-six-minute runtime in conversation, but there’s enough movement of characters and story both through and outside that dialogue that it never gets boring. Aase and Schrooten embody the archetypes of their characters (stripper and repressed evangelical) very well, and they manage to keep the story moving, even when the characters are literally trapped, through their hammy chemistry.

But while the acting is exactly what you would want from a film of this type, the script is where Revealer still leaves a little to be desired. The audience easily understands the relationship between the two main characters, as well as how that relationship will evolve over the course of the film (from rivals to friends with broadened perspectives), but the actual moments in the script where that development occurs can feel a little rocky. One of the characters will have a moment of really good development that is validated by the other, but ten minutes later a small jostle will lead to that character entirely backtracking into their narrow-minded ways. This can lead to Angie and Sally’s friendship feeling uneven in its progress, since there are some moments where they slingshot back into taking jabs at each other fairly late in the film. This is obviously a small complaint, because we know that personal growth in real life is not linear, but in a film so short, some concessions have to be made in order to keep the story moving smoothly.

In terms of practical and visual effects (horror longhand for “monsters and gore”), Revealer knows exactly what it can accomplish without anything feeling out of place with the rest of the set. There is relatively little gore, save a couple really nice shots, and the main monster, the demon Asmodeus, is (yes) clearly a guy in a suit, but that feels very okay; some budget-breaking CGI would have smashed the suspension of disbelief even more clearly by being so separate from the rest of the film. A rubber mask is much more in keeping with the aesthetics and spirit of the film, so it was a good call on the part of the filmmakers (though it was perhaps the only call they had). The little CGI they did use, on some minor snake demons, was blended very well into the rest of the scene, perhaps through using some entirely 3D-modeled tunnels like in the end credits. 

Now comes the question I feel I have to answer at the end of every one of these reviews, although I feel less and less these days that it’s important: Is the movie scary? Well, no. Absolutely not. It’s goofy and low budget, with neon lights and very phallic snake demons everywhere.  It also tells a fairly predictable story with very little suspense. But all of that is absolutely fine, because Revealer does what it sets out to do, which is to be a fun take on the current trend for recent-years nostalgia in horror, without actually tipping over into being a full horror-comedy. Sometimes that’s all a film needs to be. If you subscribe to Shudder, this one is an easy choice for a summer watch. 

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