River Review: Unoriginal Slasher Doesn't Recover From Early Stumbles [TIFF]

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Jane Levy frightened and floating in water in River

Though its second half is much better than its first, River ultimately suffers from a lack of genre creativity it just can't overcome.

Published Sep 11, 2026, 11:35 AM EDT

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In 2018, filmmaker Joshua Giuliano put a fresh spin on the tried-and-tested slasher genre with In Sound, We Live Forever, a short film that separated the audio of its violence from its visuals. Eight years later, Giuliano returns to the slasher genre for River, a disappointingly routine slasher borrowing from a myriad of other, better movies, but that admittedly improves as it moves along.

Making its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, River follows three siblings (Jane Levy, Jessica Rothe, Max Mattern), who gather after years of estrangement to spread their recently deceased father’s ashes in a local river. While making the journey onto the isolated open water, the trio’s boat stalls, leaving them stuck with few viable options for escape at their disposal. To make matters decidedly worse, an ominous masked man (Dane DiLiegro) watches them from the surrounding woods and, after patiently waiting, decides to do more than just stare.

River Sluggishly Swims Through A Conventional Slasher Story

The cold open of River borrows heavily from Giuliano’s aforementioned short in allowing the audience to witness the aftermath of a masked killer’s reign of terror with audio of the actual massacre. Stilted voice acting aside, the beginning admirably does something different from the average slasher fare, although that’s about all the novelty that Giuliano’s feature film has to offer.

Taking far too long to introduce the masked killer and let him loose on the three unsuspecting siblings, River moves at a painfully sluggish pace through a dull first act. Giuliano tries to earn audience investment in the strained relationships of the siblings and the different ways they approach the death of their alcoholic father, but the dialogue proves so stiff, trite, and uninspired that it’s difficult to care much about what’s happening.

River’s Masked Killer Eventually Injects Much-Needed Thrills Into The Mix

Thankfully, the film finally kicks into gear when the masked killer lurking in the woods begins to torment the siblings trapped in the boat. Giuliano exhibits a strong handling of cinematic geography to render open waters an unusually claustrophobic setting for a slasher film, while methodically amplifying the tension with a number of punctuated visuals. None of what unfolds on screen is particularly unique – shades of Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Deliverance are all over this film – yet it’s all handled with enough craftsmanship to make for far more compelling viewing than its grating start.

More bloodthirsty horror hounds will likely come away satisfied with what this movie has to offer. Although the body count is far lower than the average slasher, Dane DiLiegro’s masked killer serves as a formidable, unsettling threat and is responsible for a handful of harrowing frights – one of which is one of the better jump scares of the year.

Making DiLiegro’s killer all the more striking is the fact that he is naked, except a tiny pair of shorts and a plain mask that resembles a human face. In designing his killer in such a way, Giuliano seems to be suggesting that he is stripping down the slasher, both literally and figuratively. It’s a potential interesting approach to an overdone genre with plenty of untapped potential, but even DiLiegro’s foreboding screen presence doesn’t make up for just how clichéd and trope-ridden River is.

Despite the promise of its inventive filmmaker, whose first venture into this genre was a welcome breath of fresh air, River is about as conventional a slasher film as one could envision. Diehard fans of the genre made famous by the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th will likely get some mileage out of Giuliano’s feature debut, but others may struggle to stay afloat in these choppy waters.

River premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.