The Exit State
Official synopsis
Set in a United States spiraling toward authoritarian collapse, The Exit State follows a group of Americans fleeing south toward Mexico. Taking refuge in what they believe is a safe house in neutral territory, they soon learn the shelter is anything but safe, and that escape will come at a terrifying cost.
Review
With The Exit State, director Gabriela Ledesma serves up a fear-fare feature that combines horror and political thriller elements. The film has its share of surprise reveals, which I won’t discuss here. Suffice it to say that Ledesma, working from a screenplay that she cowrote with stars Josh George and Callie Schuttera, does a keen job of ramping up the suspense and delivering the unexpected while getting the film’s political message across.
Claire (Schuttera) and Vince (George) are a brother and sister who provide a safe house for American refugees fleeing the state of martial law in the U.S. as they attempt to cross the border to Mexico. Schuttera and George head up a solid ensemble cast, with the actors portraying characters that differ well from the usual travelers-in-peril types in by-the-numbers fright fare. The Exit State is a horror film calculated to make viewers think about the looming specter of authoritarianism as well as wince at the kills.
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The Exit State, from Chroma, is available on digital from October 23, 2026, on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Postmortem
Official synopsis
Six months after her husband’s sudden death, medical examiner Helena Martinez runs a small morgue on the California–Mexico border, holding herself and her teenage daughter together by not talking about it. Then sixteen bodies arrive at once: an elderly cult that took its own lives in a ritual meant to raise their leader from the dead. Processing them, Helena finds the ceremony recorded on the members’ own camcorder, and one survivor still breathing in the hospital next door. He tells her the ritual can be finished. She has a body of her own.
Review
Cult weirdness, occult rituals, reviving the dead — writer/director Andres Beltran’s Postmortem offers all this and more. Infused with strong senses of dread and grieving, the film also uses Latin American supernatural elements that bring a different sense of the mysterious to the proceedings. Odette Annable gives a terrific performance as Helena, a widowed mother whose husband Richard (Andres Londono) died of a heart attack one year later. She isn’t coping well, to say the least, as she eats locks of his hair and keeps his body frozen at the morgue where she works. Also, her relationship with her teenage daughter Julia (Allegra Leguizamo) is strained.
When a tragedy involving a mass death of cult members gives Helena the opportunity to try and resurrect her husband from the dead, she takes it. Seasoned scare-fare aficionados will make educated guesses that this is highly unlikely to turn out well.
Beltran combines elements of “The Monkey’s Paw” and Frankenstein themes while adding a fine dose of originality. The Latin American otherworldly factors also help make Postmortem a unique feature. The film is a bit of a slow burn but overall is nicely paced and it is well worth waiting for the horrors of the third act. Annable’s fine performance as a mournful woman driven to desperation and Beltran’s skillful work at the helm are just two of the reasons to put Postmortem on your need-to-see list.
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The Exit State and Postmortem screened as part of Screamfest, which ran October 6–15, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
