Psycho Killer Review: A Slasher From the Screenwriter of Se7en

Andrew Kevin Walker’s name carries a certain promise. As the screenwriter of Se7en, he helped define the modern serial-killer thriller: morally diseased, atmospheric, and impossible to shake. So a film called Psycho Killer, scripted by Walker and directed by Gavin Polone in his feature directorial debut, arrives with built-in curiosity. Add Georgina Campbell in the lead and a supporting appearance from Malcolm McDowell, and the package sounds even more intriguing. Unfortunately, the finished movie feels far less like a rediscovered gem than a project that spent too long in development and emerged with its sharp edges dulled.

The setup is direct and pulpy in the way many slashers aim to be. Campbell plays Jane, a highway patrol officer pursuing the masked murderer responsible for killing her husband. Law enforcement has been unable to pin him down. He leaves no digital footprint, travels by car, and moves through the country as if he belongs to an older, more analog era of crime. The killer’s motives are even more grandiose than his evasiveness: he is tied to satanic imagery and apparently believes his murders are part of a larger mission to “open the gates of hell”, with a nuclear power plant becoming central to that deranged objective.

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On paper, that premise could have gone in one of two entertaining directions:

either a genuinely oppressive thriller in the Fincher mold, or a knowingly over-the-top horror movie that embraces its own absurdity.

Psycho Killer never fully commits to either. Instead, it sits awkwardly in between—too solemn to be fun camp, too clumsy to be truly chilling.

That tonal uncertainty is the movie’s biggest problem. The villain is built from familiar, almost retro horror shorthand: long hair, satanic iconography, ritualistic violence, heavy-metal-coded menace, and cryptic plans dressed up as mythic evil. There is nothing inherently wrong with using old genre ingredients, but the execution makes the character feel less archetypal than stale. He seems imported from a much older wave of horror, one obsessed with satanic panic and anti-occult paranoia, without enough reinvention to make him feel freshly disturbing in a contemporary setting.

The script also gestures toward modern anxieties—particularly the idea that authorities have become so dependent on digital evidence that someone who avoids phones, apps, cameras, and online records can move almost invisibly. That concept is actually one of the film’s more interesting ideas. In a better movie, it could have deepened the procedural aspect and given the chase a paranoid, modern edge. Here, though, it mostly plays like a tossed-off explanation for why the killer remains impossible to catch.

Campbell does what she can with a role that asks her to remain intensely serious while the material grows increasingly lurid. She gives Jane a weary determination that helps ground the film, even when the screenplay pushes her into familiar revenge-thriller beats. Anyone who admired Campbell’s presence in Barbarian will probably find her watchable here too, but this is not a performance that the movie knows how to build around. Jane spends much of the runtime chasing clues, surviving attacks, and moving from one grimly stylized encounter to the next, yet the character never becomes as psychologically vivid as the story seems to think she is.

The film’s structure adds to that frustration. It hops through genre signposts rather than creating a strong sense of escalation. There is a motel massacre, obligatory side victims to keep the body count alive, cryptic clue-chasing, and a cross-country pursuit that should feel expansive but instead often feels generic. For long stretches, Psycho Killer resembles a collage of things viewers have seen before in better slashers, better thrillers, and certainly better serial-killer procedurals.

One of the few sequences with some actual personality arrives when Jane’s hunt leads into the orbit of a wealthy eccentric played by Malcolm McDowell. The scene has a strange, feverish energy the rest of the movie badly needs. Devil worshippers lounge around with delusions of grandeur, the atmosphere turns weirdly decadent, and McDowell—reliably entertaining even in shaky material—briefly injects the movie with the kind of wicked amusement it otherwise avoids. It is not enough to save the film, but it does hint at a more memorable version of Psycho Killer: one willing to be nastier, stranger, or even darkly funny.

Spoiler-light verdict on the ending: the finale aims for operatic horror but lands with a thud. Rather than delivering a terrifying payoff, it pushes the movie’s excesses into near-parody, complete with heavy-handed visuals and a climax that feels more ridiculous than haunting.

It is hard not to wonder whether the movie’s long gestation hurt it. A project reportedly developed over many years can sometimes arrive sharpened by patience; other times, it feels trapped between old drafts, old trends, and newer expectations. Psycho Killer belongs to the latter category. There are traces of an earlier era’s thriller sensibility all over it, but the filmmaking surrounding those ideas—CGI blood, labored slow motion, flat visual punch, and a general direct-to-streaming aesthetic—rarely elevates them.

That is what makes the Se7en comparison so unavoidable and so damaging. To be fair, Psycho Killer is not trying to literally recreate that classic. But Walker’s involvement naturally invites hopes for a similarly diseased moral atmosphere, sharp character writing, or a villain whose madness reflects something larger and uglier about the world. Instead, the film settles for surface darkness: symbols, threats, gore, and grim faces without much of the suffocating existential dread that made Walker’s best-known work so effective.

The most generous reading is that this is a throwback B-movie slasher trying to merge revenge-thriller momentum with occult serial-killer lore. Some viewers may enjoy it on exactly those terms. If your tolerance for familiar genre tropes is high, and if the idea of a masked satanic road-movie killer still has appeal on its own, there is some pulpy watchability here. But for anyone drawn in by the pedigree behind the screenplay, the result is likely to feel thin, dated, and disappointingly assembled.

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Final Verdict: Psycho Killer has a title that promises trashy fun and a writer credit that promises something smarter. It never fully delivers either. Georgina Campbell gives the film a serious center, Malcolm McDowell briefly wakes it up, and there are flashes of a more entertainingly deranged movie lurking in the margins. Still, the whole thing plays like a bargain-bin blend of slasher clichés, occult nonsense, and serial-killer procedural leftovers—closer to a cut-rate imitation of Fincher-adjacent dread than a compelling thriller in its own right.

Rating: 2/5