Popcorn Frights 2025: ‘Crossword’ emerges from the festival as the best entry

The depiction of grief in horror has a longstanding tradition. From such classics as Don’t Look Now and The Haunting of Julia to contemporary masterpieces like The Babadook and Midsommar, the genre remains a rich tapestry for one of life’s most brutal experiences. Through writer/director Michael Vlamis’ disturbed mind, his festival-circulating Crossword emerges from this summer’s FrightFest as the cream of the crop. He tinkers with grief just enough to make it a surefire standout, enticing the audience into its dark, hypnotic storytelling that goes for the gut.

James (Vlamis) is down on his luck, and his wife Tessa (Aurora Perrineau) encourages him to find purpose and meaning in his everyday life, even if it’s just to do the daily crossword in the newspaper. Suffering from the loss of their daughter, James and Tessa handle the tragedy in vastly polarizing ways. Tessa uses her pain for a series of children’s books that have really popped off. James grows increasingly resentful, slinking away from the world one crossword puzzle at a time. But as the days fall like dominoes into the next, he begins experiencing something not of this world. Life around him begins morphing into crossword clues that make no sense. He tries valiantly to make Tessa understand what’s happening to him, but she scoffs and shrugs off his paranoia.

Crossword sees Vlamis playing triple duty. Both in front of and behind the camera, he operates on all cylinders to deliver a harrowing and honest tale that feels innately personal. Moments of real terror mingle with gutting confessions about what it means to live and die, and be left holding broken shards of the past. Nothing James does or says can ever bring back his daughter, and his inability to move on ultimately stops him in his tracks. Across the board, the performances are molded with visceral, true-to-life nuance that sits somewhere in the gray area of numbness. Perrineau perfectly counters Vlamis frantic, sometimes unhinged performance that gives the film a bit of weight.

With the help of cinematographer Burke Doeren, Vlamis coats the screen with suffocating dread, that there is something terribly evil lurking just out of frame. We can’t see it, but it’s always there, as the driving force behind the action. It wrings emotions from the inside, permitting the viewer to experience the same devastating aftereffects that leave you agonizing and breathless.

Michael Vlamis’ Crossword is a special moment, like catching lightning in a bottle. It’s a radiant and moving reflection of unimaginable pain that you just can’t get over. And why would you want to? Grief becomes an essential part of your life experience, and you simply make more room for it. It never goes away; it just sits there as rocks at the bottom of the ocean. Any attempt to shake it is futile, and Crossword understands that. Vlamis merely offers a cathartic conduit by which we can process our own life story and learn how to accept the things we cannot control. Grief is a horrible, life-altering experience, but films like Crossword help us gain clarity on a deeper level.