Tinsman Road (2025)
Directed & Written by Robbie Banfitch
Starring Robbie Banfitch, Leslie Ann Banfitch, & Salem Belladonna (voice).

Horror

★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters was a frightening trip into strange and cosmic territory, whereas his latest film, Tinsman Road—appearing at 2025’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival—is a scarily human meditation on grief. The film takes place several years after a young woman named Noelle Lyle goes missing, and her brother Robbie (Robbie Banfitch) returns to his hometown to spend a few months with his mother, Leslie (Leslie Ann Banfitch), while he films a documentary about his sister. Leslie’s convinced that Noelle is now an angel who still lingers in the home. Others around town assume Noelle was murdered, though have no idea by whom. Robbie does his best to investigate Noelle’s disappearance and keeps himself open to all possibilities. The further he digs, the darker the truth becomes.

Tinsman Road is at times a very tedious film due to the pacing, yet at certain moments it fires on all creepy cylinders as Robbie attempts to keep an open mind about what he’ll discover and where exactly his sister has ended up after all this time. The greatest parts of Banfitch’s film are when it’s examining, often uncomfortably (in the best way possible), the extent of how grief affects a family. Both Robbie and his mother are affected in different ways by their grief over Noelle’s disappearance. Neither of them have entirely dealt with it, which has left them scarred and even at odds with each other. Tinsman Road is a bit too long, and meanders too much for the suspense to hold up through the runtime; however, it remains an often chilling, always claustrophobic rumination on the dark void left behind when a loved one is ripped from those who love them.
A significant part of Tinsman Road involves Robbie’s search for the real-life reason(s) behind his sister’s disappearance in contrast to his mother’s reliance on a supernatural/religious comfort. As the film wears on, Robbie does wonder whether there’s something substantial behind his mother’s faith. He’s never fully able to figure out if his mother’s been in his sister’s old room winding up a music box he hears playing randomly in the night, or if Noelle is actually still present in the house beyond death. Robbie wavers between believing in real-life theories about Noelle’s disappearance and leaning into the possibility of the supernatural at work. His eventual discoveries about what happened to his sister hammer home that we must be careful what we seek because the answers we receive may not be the ones we want. The film understands that sometimes we insert ourselves into a narrative to our own detriment, even if inadvertently; a narrative has no feelings, it only cares about its beginning, middle, and inevitable end.

There’s a certain reality in Tinsman Road born out of the fact that Robbie plays a character of the same name, minus the last name, and his actual mother Leslie plays the fictional Robbie’s mother of the same name, too. This adds an authenticity to the film, as well as gravitas when Robbie and Leslie have their most tense moments. If this were uploaded to YouTube, you might believe for a while that this found footage film is a genuine slice of a grief-stricken family’s home videos. The palpable sense of reality for most of Tinsman Road‘s runtime is what makes the film worthwhile and very unsettling. More than that, Robbie’s perilous, horrifying journey through the wringer of grief and uncertainty depicts exactly how losing someone can potentially push us towards destruction.