Sarah Yarkin
Melody
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
“The face of madness returns.”
2022
1h 23m
Director: David Blue Garcia
Overview
After nearly 50 years of hiding, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of idealistic influencers who accidentally disrupt his carefully shielded world in a remote Texas town.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
4 min readThe Saw Is Family
I didn’t expect to feel sorry for Leatherface.
That’s not how this is supposed to work. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has always been about the terror of the inhuman—faceless killers, rotting meat, the chainsaw as a force of nature. But in David Blue Garcia’s 2022 sequel, Leatherface isn’t just a monster.
He’s a relic, a man out of time, and the film’s most tragic figure. The problem isn’t that he’s too human. It’s that the world around him is too shallow to notice.
The setup is simple: a group of influencers, led by Sarah Yarkin’s Melody and Elsie Fisher’s Lila, roll into the abandoned Texas town of Harlow to flip real estate and livestream their way to clout. They stumble upon Leatherface’s dilapidated home, where he’s been living quietly with his adoptive family—now dead, their bodies preserved like macabre mannequins. The moment the influencers barge in, the film’s central tension snaps into place: this isn’t just a slasher.
It’s a culture clash. On one side, a man who’s spent 50 years hiding from the world. On the other, a group of people who’ve never known how to exist without an audience.
The film’s most telling moment comes early, when the influencers discover the preserved bodies of Leatherface’s family. Instead of horror, their first instinct is to film it. One of them even poses for a selfie in front of the corpses, grinning like it’s just another Instagram story.
It’s a cheap shot, but an effective one. The film isn’t just critiquing influencer culture—it’s suggesting that these characters are so detached from reality that they can’t even recognize the sacredness of death. To them, everything is content.
To Leatherface, everything is sacred.
This is where the film’s heart lies, and where it stumbles. The influencers are written as one-dimensional caricatures—self-absorbed, cringe-worthy, and ultimately disposable. That’s not necessarily a flaw; slasher films have always thrived on the idea that the audience should root for the killer.
Audience Opinions
Audience 4.0/10
"A brutal, visually slick slasher that excels in gore but is dragged down by shallow characters and clumsy writing."
The film is praised for nasty, over-the-top kills, strong practical makeup work, and stylish cinematography that make it an enjoyable body-count horror piece if expectations are kept low. latestnetflix.com's take is that at the same time, cardboard characters, awkward dialogue, forced topical references, and a flimsy attempt to tie into the original movie leave it feeling disposable and often unintentionally goofy.
What viewers praise
- Gnarly kill scenes Creative, over-the-top deaths and set pieces deliver the kind of savage mayhem slasher devotees look for.
- Effective gore effects Makeup and practical effects are frequently singled out as some of the strongest work in the movie.
- Stylish cinematography Shot composition and color grading give the film a polished, modern horror look that stands out from the script quality.
- Fast and energetic pacing Short runtime and near-constant action keep things from ever feeling slow, functioning as a lean splatter-fest.
Common complaints
- Unlikable shallow characters Most of the cast is seen as flat, one-note, or irritating enough that Leatherface becomes easier to root for than the survivors.
- Cringe dialogue and humor Lines built around social media and cancel culture, like the infamous bus moment, come off as try-hard and embarrassing rather than clever.
- Clumsy social subplots Elements such as the school-shooting backstory and surface-level commentary on gentrification and online culture feel shoehorned in and add little to the story.
- Weak legacy connection The attempt to bring back Sally Hardesty is widely viewed as a mishandled echo of other legacy sequels that adds emotional weight on paper but not on screen.
- Messy franchise continuity Positioning this as a direct sequel to the 1974 film while ignoring other entries makes the timeline feel even more convoluted without offering a satisfying payoff.
Recommended for
Hardcore slasher completists Gorehounds prioritizing kills Casual late-night horror viewing Leatherface franchise collectors
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey fired the directors after one week, then threw out the footage.
Legendary's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the 2022 Netflix film, not the 1974 Tobe Hooper original and not the 2003 remake, shut down in Bulgaria in August 2020. Andy and Ryan Tohill were out over creative differences. Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline reported that financier Legendary "didn't spark to what it saw." David Blue Garcia, coming off the $58,000 Tejano, started over from scratch. Cinematographer Angus Mitchell left with the brothers. Ricardo Diaz came in. Garcia told the Austin Chronicle that making Bulgaria look like Texas meant leaning toward West Texas near the Fort Davis mountains, and that they never had enough barbed wire. The original put Texas on a map nobody wanted. latestnetflix.com's read is that this one built Harlow on a Bulgarian backlot and hoped you would not notice.
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The pitch was Halloween 2018 for Leatherface. Direct sequel, fifty years later, old man in the mask. Mark Burnham took the role because Gunnar Hansen had died in 2015. Alvarez said if Hansen had been alive, "I'm pretty sure he would have played" it, so they hunted for someone who could have been Gunnar today. Olwen Fouere played Sally Hardesty because Marilyn Burns had died in 2014. John Larroquette came back to narrate, as he had in 1974 and the 2003 films. Fede Alvarez produced with Kim Henkel, who co-wrote the original. Alvarez told Bloody Disgusting that Leatherface probably ran, that a caregiver took him in, and that the messy sequels could still have happened offscreen. He did not want the Halloween trick of pretending the other movies never existed. , ,
Gentrifiers, then a bus
Chris Thomas Devlin's script sends Sarah Yarkin, Elsie Fisher, Jacob Latimore, and Nell Hudson to the ghost town of Harlow to flip properties. They evict Alice Krige's Ginny from an orphanage. Leatherface lives upstairs. The trailer sold "idealistic young friends." The movie sold gentrifiers, a Confederate-flag argument, a school-shooting survivor who will not touch a gun, and a bus full of buyers who film the killer and threaten to cancel him. Alvarez told Collider the title required more than five bodies. "It wasn't going to be called a massacre by just killing five people." He wanted the bus scene to earn the word. Critics called the politics a mess. Deadline's Valerie Complex said the real horror was "Twitter buzz words" dropped "in a careless fashion." Owen Gleiberman at Variety called it "a blood-soaked but unscary footnote." Rotten Tomatoes settled at 30 percent from 162 reviews. Metacritic gave it 34. , ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcI6SFiK_yk
It still did numbers. Netflix logged 29.2 million hours in the first week, debuting at No. 2 globally, and it sat at No. 1 in the United States, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia five days in. Test screenings had already leaked as mixed in May 2021, then Alvarez said they were mostly positive. The theatrical plan from 2020 became a Netflix exclusive in August 2021. Runtime is 83 minutes, short even for a slasher. The rights have since gone wandering again, with A24 later in the mix for a new chapter. The 2022 film remains the one where Leatherface dances in the street holding a millennial's head, in a Texas town built in Bulgaria, after the first directors got the chainsaw. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.