Scare Out
Movies watched in 2026
Scare Out (2026, China)
Director: Zhang Yimou
Writer: Liang Chen
Mini-review:
I'm going to go straight to the point, cause I'm very clear on what I liked and disliked about this movie. As a whole, it's a solidly entertaining spy thriller that kept me engaged from beginning to end. The cast is excellent, with great lead performances from Jackson Yee and Zhu Yiling and a very impressive supporting turn from Yang Mi. Now it's when things get ugly. From a technical point of view, the movie is a mess. The cinematography has this TV-like feel to it that I would have never expected from a Zhang Yimou film. And then there's the awful, awful editing. The constant rapid cuts, the obsession with inserting random close-up shots of every single character present in a scene, the tendency to show a character reacting to something twice in a row... It's just laughably bad, especially during the first half. It's not exactly enough to derail the movie, since the story is pretty interesting, but there were times where it pulled me out of it. I really don't know what went wrong there. All in all, Scare Out is a technically flawed but enjoyable thriller.
