Dolly (2025)
Directed by Rod Blackhurst
Screenplay by Blackhurst & Brandon Weavil
Starring Max the Impaler, Fabianne Therese, Seann William Scott, Kate Cobb, Russ Tiller, Michalina Scorzelli, & Ethan Suplee.

Horror

★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
MINOR SPOILERS.

One of the creepier films at Fantastic Fest 2025 was Dolly, the harrowing story of Macy (Fabianne Therese), whose life changes after she and her soon-to-be fiancee Chase (Seann William Scott) are attacked by a monstrous woman called Dolly (Max the Impaler). It’s more so Chase who’s attacked. Macy winds up kidnapped back to Dolly’s home, where she’s turned into a living doll. Macy gradually gets a look inside Dolly’s twisted home and world. And they’re not alone in that big, old, creepy house, either. Rod Blackhurst’s film is an appropriately ugly, dark look at the results of physical and emotional trauma, as well as how cycles of traumatic violence can go on repeating like a macabre echo.Blackhurst’s film feels partly inspired by films like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, partly built in the image of a dark fairytale, as Macy falls into a world that feels far from her own—a Red Riding Hood who doesn’t stumble upon the home of a few hungry, sleepy bears, but instead stumbles upon a home haunted by violence and trauma. Even the opening of the film features a poem akin to a fairytale story, then the rest of the film takes on a literary format by being split into chapters.
The meat and bones of Dolly is a haunting, Gothic reoccurrence of trauma, both for Dolly, who’s reenacting what her father ‘taught’ her, and for Macy, whose past mommy trauma is alluded to early in the film when Macy’s told: “You‘re nothing like her . . . You‘re not a monster.” Dolly tries to become Macy’s surrogate mother, going so far as to ‘change’ her like an infant, keeping her in a baby’s crib within a very dollhouse-like room dressed as a human doll. It all gets wildly unsettling when Dolly prepares to feed Macy, just like many mothers feed their newborn babies; no need to spell it out. Yet Dolly does resist the way she treats her pretend baby/doll Macy. We witness it in a scene after Macy attempts to escape but gets caught and spanked viciously by Dolly. This act sends Dolly into a mental breakdown momentarily, likely recalling the abuse already done to her; also very reminiscent of the scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre after Leatherface must kill one of the intruders in his home but then immediately has a panic attack afterwards.

“I never wanted to be a mother.”

Dolly is a disturbing piece of horror that, while reminiscent of many other films before it, has something genuine to say about the real-life horrors of trauma. Macy’s confrontation with Dolly gives terrifying life to the stories of victims who wind up being retraumatised again and again due to monstrous people preying on their vulnerability. Dolly’s actions likewise give awful life to the stories of some victims who go on to traumatise others, using their own traumatic experiences as a bludgeon with which to take out their pain on people. Blackhurst offers up a film that feels familiar but sets itself apart by really digging into its themes instead of letting all the visceral horror overtake them. Dolly is a cruel piece of work, and so it should be; to be anything else would betray the nasty things it explores.