Fear, Fire, and… Not Much Else
I Am Fear really wants you to know it’s about something. Terrorism. Media spectacle. Islamophobia. American paranoia. Wildfires. Supernatural forces. July 4th. At some point you start to suspect someone had a checklist and decided to just throw every Hot Topic into a blender and call it a screenplay.
On paper, the premise sounds promising: a journalist kidnapped by a terrorist sleeper cell in Los Angeles, planning to behead her on a live webcast over Independence Day weekend, only for supernatural forces to start messing with everyone’s sanity as wildfires rage in the background. That’s a bold, combustible setup.
On screen, it plays like a very long, very self-serious “What if Homeland but with demons?” spec script that probably should’ve stayed on someone’s external hard drive.
Big Themes, Tiny Execution
The movie clearly wants to position itself as a horror-thriller with depth. You can feel it straining for “commentary”:
-
Terrorists staging a beheading as a media event.
-
A journalist as both victim and symbol of a sensationalist news culture.
-
The backdrop of California wildfires, conveniently echoing the chaos.
-
A supernatural element that’s supposed to literalize fear itself.
In a better film, those might weave together into something unsettling and provocative. Here, they sit next to each other like awkward strangers at a party, occasionally brushing shoulders but never actually connecting.
Instead of feeling layered, it feels unfocused—like the movie can’t decide whether it’s:
-
A kidnapping thriller
-
A supernatural horror film
-
A political allegory
-
Or a very long PSA about how extremists and sensationalist media both suck
So it kind of half-commits to all of them and fully satisfies none.
The Terrorists: Flat Villains, Flatlining Tension
Terrorism is a tricky subject. You either treat it with nuance, or you go full cartoon villain and at least lean into pulp. I Am Fear somehow chooses door number three: flat stereotypes wrapped in fake gravitas.
We follow a sleeper cell of terrorists in LA who have kidnapped journalist Sara Brown (played by Kristina Klebe). They intend to livestream her beheading on the Fourth of July, which should be horrifying and tense. Instead, the film oddly deflates its own terror.
Despite a strong cast on paper—Faran Tahir as Asad, Eoin Macken as Joshua, William Forsythe, Bill Moseley—you rarely feel like you’re watching three-dimensional people. You’re watching “the conflicted one,” “the fanatic,” “the mastermind,” and “the white American nationalist guy” all arranged like character archetypes on a storyboard.
The script occasionally gestures at complexity—suggesting that fear itself is being weaponized by both sides—but it’s so blunt and on-the-nose that any nuance gets smothered under monologues and mood lighting.
The Journalist: A Symbol Looking for a Character
Kristina Klebe’s Sara Brown should be the emotional anchor of the movie—a journalist caught in the middle, representing a media machine that sells fear and a culture that gobbles it up. She’s literally strapped to the metaphor, and the movie still can’t do much with her.
We get hints of backstory, flashes of her coverage, bits of commentary on how the press commodifies terror. But Sara never quite feels like a person with agency; she feels like a concept the script is proud of.
There are opportunities for genuine psychological horror here: the terror of being a captive, knowing your death is scheduled content. Instead, the film dilutes that with philosophical chatter and supernatural hints, rarely letting us sit with her raw, human fear.
For a movie called I Am Fear, it spends a surprising amount of time not making us feel any.
Supernatural Horror: Fear Incarnate…ish
And then there’s the supernatural element—because obviously terrorism and wildfires weren’t quite enough.
As the planned execution date approaches, strange things begin happening: hallucinations, visions, breakdowns. The implication is that something ancient and malevolent is feeding on all this hatred, violence, and fear. The terrorists become unstable; their sanity frays.
In theory, this is a fascinating idea: fear as a literal entity that thrives on our worst impulses. In practice, it’s mostly vague spooky imagery and half-explained lore stapled onto what is otherwise a grim hostage narrative.
The supernatural intrusions don’t build to a cohesive mythology or a disturbing revelation. They mostly function as, “Hey, what if someone had a freak-out now?” moments. Combined with the wildfire backdrop, it starts to feel like the film is whispering, “See? Fear is everywhere,” without doing the work to truly earn that concept.
Wildfires as Wallpaper
The Southern California wildfires form a constant backdrop, both visually and thematically. Smoke in the air. Fire on the hills. A world literally burning while human beings stage their own little apocalypse in a warehouse.
That should be powerful. Instead, it mostly plays like expensive production value for a movie that doesn’t know what to do with it. The fires are there to remind us that the world is chaotic and collapsing, sure—but once you’ve got that, what next?
Nothing much, apparently. The wildfires don’t meaningfully intersect with the story. They’re just constant visual punctuation: “By the way, things are bad out there too.” It’s climate disaster as set dressing.
A Strong Cast, Stranded
This is one of those movies where you look at the cast list and think, “Oh, this could cook,” and then the film hands everyone underwritten dialogue and asks them to carry entire themes with their eyebrows.
-
William Forsythe and Bill Moseley bring their usual presence, but the script gives them little to do beyond glower and embody archetypes.
-
Faran Tahir, who’s capable of incredible intensity and nuance, is basically wasted as yet another generic militant leader type.
-
Eoin Macken as Joshua gets some internal conflict to chew on, but it’s more hinted than explored.
Everyone is trying, but they’re acting inside a script that confuses “grim” with “deep” and “symbolic” with “developed.”
Fear as a Brand, Not a Feeling
The most frustrating thing about I Am Fear is that it keeps circling interesting ideas without ever landing on them. Terrorism as a performative spectacle. News media as horror distributor. Fear as something cosmic and corrosive.
But instead of digging into any of that, it settles for surface-level edginess and messaging that might as well be written on a poster:
-
“We’re all complicit.”
-
“Fear controls us.”
-
“Extremism feeds on attention.”
Yes. True. Also, that’s a good starting point for a story—not the entire story.
By the time the film limps toward its conclusion, you’re less concerned with what happens to the characters and more curious about how many different metaphors can be crammed into one running time.
Final Verdict: I Am… Mostly Indifferent
I Am Fear wants to be a bold, thought-provoking horror film about terrorism, media, and the corrosive power of fear. Instead, it feels like a rough draft of three different movies stitched together and told with a straight face.
It’s not offensively awful or hilariously bad; it’s worse than that for a horror fan—it’s forgettable. You can sense the ambition, the desire to say something meaningful, but the execution is clumsy, the characters undercooked, and the “fear incarnate” angle underwhelming.
In the end, the scariest thing about I Am Fear (2020) is realizing how much more effective and unsettling this premise could have been in sharper hands. The film declares, “I am fear,” and you kind of want to pat it on the head and reply, “You are… trying. And that’s something, I guess.”
