Film Review

Halloween Ends (2022) — a bold, brave, unexpected resolution to harshly divide opinion

Four years after Michael Myers returned and disappeared, his influence maintains a grip on the community…

David Gordon Green’s sequel trilogy comes to a divisive close with Halloween Ends, which is as definitive as the title promises. Halloween (2018) was a solid return for this veteran franchise and found new areas to explore, mainly regarding Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) wrestling with PTSD four decades after the events of Halloween (1978) where she survived Michael Myers’ massacre across Haddonfield, Illinois. The immediate sequel, Halloween Kills (2021) was a superficial and unconvincing exploration of how a close-knit community’s grief can lead to them becoming a bloodthirsty mob, which felt more like a feature-length extension of the prior film’s climax with Michael at his most sadistic. Mercifully, Halloween Ends has a better screenplay with something deeper to say about evil as a societal contagion, although the lack of bloodshed from Myers himself will certainly disappoint many.