Benediction
2022 · 18m · United States
Directed by Zandashé Brown
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A woman visits an unfamiliar church seeking comfort, but what she finds there turns sinister.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A woman seeks solace in a church and finds the opposite—it's the oldest horror setup in the book, which is exactly why Brown's willingness to go there feels like a trap for people who confuse novelty with vision.
Benediction locates itself within a lineage of spiritual horror that runs from Polanski through contemporary folk-dread cinema, and the formal restraint—what Brown chooses not to show—suggests a director thinking carefully about expectation and form.
The entire film hinges on Brown's choice to keep the camera still while the woman's certainty collapses around her; that single decision to let the space do the work rather than cut away transforms a familiar premise into something that actually unsettles.