Conor Bryce meets Dolly in this brutal throwback slasher.
There’s something funny about naming your hulking woodland slasher Dolly. You prepare for rhinestones and a power ballad. What you get instead is a seven-foot monster in a cracked porcelain mask, sobbing among rotting babydolls before playing an interesting game of “shinbone, meet shovel edge” with a hapless victim.
Dolly opens with Macy (Fabianne Therese) and her boyfriend Chase (Seann William Scott) heading into the Tennessee woods for a romantic hike (the kind with a ring in the backpack and a carefully chosen place to present it). Macy knows what’s coming but isn’t sure she wants the whole ready-made package of fiancé and stepmom duties. On their arrival the place starts throwing out warning signs: plastic dolls nailed to trees, a creepy tune leaking out of the undergrowth, an ominously still forest. Chase, in a decision that can be filed under “Man in Horror Movie Looks At Obvious Doom and Says ‘Huh’,” steps off trail to investigate. Needless to say the proposal never happens, but extreme violence does.
After some wince-inducing brutality Chase is down for the count, and Macy finds herself in a rotting house deep in the woods; dressed in childish clothes, placed in an oversized cradle and fighting for her life. Her captor is the titular Dolly (one brilliantly named wrestler Max the Impaler making their impressive debut), a huge, silent slab of overbearing motherdom. Dolly wants a child. Macy’s got the job…if she plays nice.
Watching Dolly feels like digging up some lost cult horror from the ‘80s. Shot on gritty Super 16mm, it swings between sickly over-saturation and bleached-out sunlight., tilted angles and blurry closeups. Obvious comparisons would be to Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, from the woodland setting to the masked antagonist with stunted communication skills and alarming strength, and director/co-writer Rod Blackhurst doesn’t pretend the influence is not there, with one minor character even named Tobe (wink, wink). There’s also some shades of recent breakout hit Barbarian, with a similar dark twist on pushy parenting.
Comparisons to the best video nasties on offer are earned. Like Barbarian (and that director’s follow-up, Weapons) Dolly isn’t just doing the “remember this?” routine; it has its own nasty, modern ideas to explore. Blackhurst knows how easy it is for a horror movie, particularly from this subgenre, to feel lazy. With Dolly he uses slasher movie language as a gloriously unpretentious delivery system for something both interesting and uncomfortable. The core fear here comes from forced regression - unlike the typical silent slasher villain, Dolly doesn’t just want to kill Macy in an inventive way. She wants to raise her; pushing pacifiers into her mouth with grimy sausage fingers, bottle feeding her, changing her, and - in one horribly humiliating scene - spanking her when she “misbehaves”. The film lingers on this sickening infantilising more than the grisly violence, the disgust and terror of losing autonomy and dignity from the former arguably the worse fate.
These scenes are where Max the Impaler’s performance shines. Yes, Dolly is huge and supernaturally strong in the classic slasher way. But what makes her stick in your mind is the switching. One moment she’s gentle, rocking Macy lovingly. The next, she’s a shovel-swinging nightmare dervish. It’s played not as random psychosis, but the logic of someone desperate to playhouse and panicking whenever reality breaks the fantasy. The porcelain mask adds another layer, with its cracked surface, blonde ringlets and single baby-blue eye. Like Jason’s hockey mask it’s emotionally dead; a hard, glossy face frozen and blank while the body underneath is displaying rage and violence.
The movie flirts with sympathy for its villain, an undeniably risky move for a slasher movie. There are hints to Dolly’s loneliness, self-loathing and trauma. But apart from some playful revelations in the third act by a secondary villain, none of it arrives with explanatory flashbacks or a tidy origin story - and this is key. The film trusts us to sit with contradiction - Dolly can look pitiful and still be a f*cking monster. That combination is scarier than a villain who’s “just evil,” because it feels unstable. There might be rules…but nobody knows them.
Fabianne Therese’s Macy, meanwhile, gives the movie its spine it needs. A lot of slashers treat their “final girl” as a set of lungs that occasionally picks up a weapon. Macy is written, and played, as someone thinking in real time - when to fight, when to pretend, when to bargain with humiliation, when to risk everything on one move. She’s easily Max’s equal in the “getting put through the wringer” stakes, too. In a movie that frequently punishes its actors in the name of art, if she’s not being dragged across splintered floors she’s fighting cracked teeth and missing nails against a seemingly unkillable foe.
There’s a darkly funny undertone to Dolly too, crucial because total misery can become boring - or worse, numbing. Blackhurst has a taste for the absurd, and lets it out in small jolts. The film knows it’s ridiculous that someone would tap a masked giant on the shoulder in the woods to ask for help. And of course, we’re going to let out a bark of incredulous laughter at the occasional cuts back to Chase, making his way through the forest with a ridiculous injury that I won’t spoil here. We also get a welcome late appearance from that tried-and-tested slasher stalwart, the inept cop. The comedy makes the blows land harder, and the brief respites never fail to catch in your throat when followed with extreme consequences.
Dolly isn’t flawless. There are moments where some oddly placed surreal imagery threatens to contradict the hard work done by the movie’s gritty aesthetic. Also, Blackhurst’s decision to lean into this weirdness and structure the film into chapters like a corrupted children’s book - “Mother,” “Daughter,” “Home” - is interesting, but unnecessary. And finally, while not a dealbreaker, seeing a few CGI gore effects creep into an otherwise authentically analogue movie is a personal bugbear. Yes, it’s easier and cheaper to add blood spatter in post-production, but it’ll never be anywhere near as effective as good old-fashioned coloured syrup.
What makes Dolly worth talking about beyond its inventive gore and clever framing of parenthood as horror, is its undercurrent of feminine monstrosity. Horror has given us countless masked men who slaughter in the name of twisted family loyalty, but few women outside of the original Friday the 13th’s Pamela Voorhees exist. Here, Dolly offers a femme-coded villain who is not played for ridicule. She’s large, physically imposing, dressed in childish clothes that clash with her frame. The film never treats her body as a punchline. She’s presented as both intimidating and, in flashes, broken and desperate for connection. The vibe here is Misery’s Annie Wilkes meets Micheal Myers, and honestly, I love it.
If you’re craving raw, visceral horror that feels sharply modern, Dolly is well worth a watch. The violence doesn’t let up, and the film never tries to dress itself up as anything else. It’s that beat-up VHS your friend lends you, swearing it’s the nastiest thing they’ve watched all year, then refuses to make eye contact while handing it over.
Lean, loud, deliberately ugly and old-fashioned without feeling like Grindhouse cosplay, Dolly is the kind of midnight movie that makes you belly-laugh at least once…right before making you regret having a stomach.
In cinemas from 6th March 2026
