Red Dawn, 1814 Edition
Ted Geoghegan’s Mohawk isn’t your grandfather’s war movie—unless your grandfather was a blood-soaked fever dream directed by Werner Herzog and scored by a thunderstorm. It’s an angry, artful, and surprisingly funny horror-action hybrid set during the War of 1812, when everyone was stabbing each other for flags no one remembers anymore.
Co-written with cult novelist Grady Hendrix (of My Best Friend’s Exorcism fame), Mohawk is part revenge western, part survival horror, and part environmental PSA delivered via hatchet. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be—this is a film that opens with fire, ends with entrails, and somehow finds room for love, grief, and the occasional sarcastic glare in between.
Love, War, and an Unpaid Therapy Bill
Our heroine, Okwaho (known as Oak), played by Kaniehtiio Horn with feral intensity, has the kind of week that makes you want to punch history. Her neutral Mohawk tribe is being slaughtered by encroaching Americans, her two lovers (one British, one Mohawk) can’t stop arguing, and her mother just told her not to start another war. Naturally, that night, her lover Calvin lights an American camp on fire and kills 22 sleeping soldiers. So much for neutrality.
What follows is a nightmare trek through blood-soaked forests as Oak, Calvin, and her British lover Joshua are hunted by a pack of deranged U.S. soldiers led by Captain Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington, playing “bloodlust with sideburns”). Along for the march are Noah Segan as the twitchy translator Yancy, and professional wrestler Jonathan “Brodie Lee” Huber as Private Lachlan Allsopp—whose quiet presence makes you wish he’d had more screen time (and fewer bullets).
This isn’t so much a war movie as a bad breakup between nations. The Americans, drunk on vengeance, chase the trio across the frontier like Manifest Destiny’s angry middle managers, while the Mohawk and her companions run, fight, and bleed with grim purpose. It’s The Revenant meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—only with better scalp care.
Colonialism, but Make It Fashion
Geoghegan shoots the 1814 wilderness like it’s alive—and kind of pissed about it. The forest isn’t just scenery; it’s a character, dense and suffocating, both womb and grave. Every tree feels complicit in the violence. The cinematography bathes everything in earthy greens and bruised reds, like a painting that refuses to stop bleeding.
The costuming is understated but striking. When Oak shaves her head and crafts armor from a deer’s hide and unborn fawn, it’s shocking, yes—but also weirdly beautiful. It’s one of the most brutal metamorphoses in recent horror: a grieving woman transforming into a war goddess, part human, part myth, and all vengeance. You don’t just root for her—you fear her, and maybe a little for yourself.
Blood, Thunder, and Existential Irony
If you came for carnage, Mohawk delivers like a tomahawk to the face. Limbs fly, arrows sing, and people die in ways that make you question the limits of human anatomy. Yet Geoghegan and Hendrix aren’t just peddling gore—they’re crafting anti-war poetry. Every kill feels heavy, even when it’s deserved.
The Americans’ self-righteous rage collapses into farce as their numbers dwindle. By the final act, they’re less an army and more a mobile nervous breakdown. Holt, obsessed with revenge and God’s approval, devolves into something both pathetic and terrifying. Ezra Buzzington’s performance is magnificent in its mania—a sweaty, snarling sermon on how patriotism curdles into psychosis.
Even Noah Segan’s Yancy, the supposed “voice of reason,” becomes complicit in horror through cowardice and denial. Everyone’s a villain here, but some wear it better than others.
Oak: The Woman, the Myth, the Chainsaw (Metaphorically Speaking)
Kaniehtiio Horn carries the movie like a torch—and sometimes literally with one. Her Oak is both fragile and unstoppable, radiating fury that feels righteous rather than theatrical. When she loses everything—her mother, her tribe, her lovers—she doesn’t scream. She sharpens.
The sequence where Oak wakes up after being shot, shaves her head, and dons her grotesque deer armor is one of modern horror’s finest metamorphoses. It’s equal parts grief ritual and superhero origin story. She doesn’t become Leatherface or Rambo; she becomes something older—something that bleeds for justice rather than glory.
By the time she faces Holt in the finale, she’s transcended revenge. She’s the embodiment of the land itself, demanding payment in flesh. Her final victory is messy, mythic, and hauntingly sad. When she impales Holt on a burnt tree stump, you can almost hear the forest exhale.
A Symphony of Screams and Moral Clarity
Composer Wojciech Golczewski’s score doesn’t so much accompany the film as wrestle it. The music throbs, pulses, and drones like the heartbeat of the earth. It’s anachronistic at times—synths hum beneath musket fire—but it works, turning the historical setting into a surreal fever dream.
This tonal collision between period realism and modern dread defines Mohawk. It’s an 1814 story told through a 2017 lens, where history isn’t distant—it’s repeating, echoing, and screaming back at us. Every musket shot feels like a metaphor, every corpse a political cartoon. Geoghegan and Hendrix don’t bother with subtlety. They wield irony like a tomahawk.
Brodie Lee: The Quiet Strength
It would be criminal not to mention Jonathan “Brodie Lee” Huber (known to wrestling fans as Luke Harper). As the soldier Allsopp, he brings depth to a role that could have been forgettable. He’s the one American who seems capable of empathy—a quiet giant torn between duty and conscience. His death is inevitable, but it stings, especially knowing it was Huber’s only film performance before his untimely passing.
In a movie where everyone screams, he whispers. And somehow, that’s louder.
War Is Hell, but the View’s Fantastic
Mohawk is a brutal film, yes—but it’s also weirdly gorgeous. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a knife carved from ivory: violent, elegant, and disturbingly beautiful. Geoghegan has crafted a horror film that doubles as a political statement, a revenge fantasy, and a love letter to Indigenous resilience.
There’s dark humor here, too—mostly from how stupidly the white soldiers die. Watching Holt’s men wander into death traps of their own making feels less like tragedy and more like Darwin Award season. If the film has a punchline, it’s that arrogance kills faster than arrows.
Final Thoughts: History with Bite Marks
Mohawk isn’t for everyone. It’s too angry for purists, too gory for pacifists, too smart for exploitation junkies, and too gleefully weird for history buffs. But for those who like their horror poetic and their revenge righteous, it’s a raw, roaring triumph.
Geoghegan and Hendrix don’t just tell a story—they exhume it. They dig through America’s soil and find the bones still twitching. And somehow, amid all the carnage, they find empathy: for the land, for the fallen, and for those who keep fighting, century after century.
By the final frame, as Oak limps through the dawn and a Mohawk family watches her pass like she’s part legend, part ghost, and part god, the message is clear: survival isn’t victory—but it’s close enough.
So yes, Mohawk is violent, bloody, and occasionally absurd. But like its heroine, it earns every scar. History may be written by the victors, but this one’s carved by the survivors—and their knives are still sharp.
