A Love Letter Written in Crayon
The Last Matinee really wants to be a love letter to Italian giallo and ’80s slashers. Instead, it feels like a sticky note you’d find on the floor of a second-run theater: smudged, half-legible, and vaguely smelling of stale popcorn and regret. Set in 1993 in a dying Montevideo cinema, the movie has a killer premise—literally. A black-gloved psycho picks off the audience one by one while an engineering student, Ana, runs her dad’s projection booth. It should be a lurid, neon-soaked blast.
Instead, it’s like watching someone describe a great horror movie they saw once, from across a crowded room, in slow motion.
Nostalgia Isn’t a Plot, It’s a Crutch
You can practically feel the director standing off-screen, whispering, “Remember Argento? Remember Bava? Remember going to the movies before smartphones?” The problem is, all that remembering never turns into much of a movie.
The theater itself is a perfect old-school setting: crumbling décor, thin crowd, the sense that the building itself has seen better decades. But instead of exploring that atmosphere, the film mostly uses it as a backdrop for a kill reel. There’s no real sense of the place as a character, just a location the production could afford.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of putting on a vintage band tee and then not being able to name a single song. Yes, you likeold horror. Now what?
Characters? We Don’t Need No Stinking Characters
The audience on the chopping block is a collection of People-Shaped Meat™ so thinly written they barely count as concepts, much less characters. We’ve got:
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A trio of teenagers, including Goni, whose defining traits are “horny” and “breathing (for now).”
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A date-night couple whose big character moment is a hand job during the movie.
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A boy who sneaks in, because horror always needs one painfully vulnerable minor.
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A girl waiting for her boyfriend, because apparently “lonely” is also a death sentence here.
Ana, our quasi-final girl projectionist, has the closest thing to a personality: she’s smart, responsible, and trying to study while running the booth. It’s a good starting point—but the film never builds anything on top of it. She’s mostly reduced to reacting to technical problems, missing obvious danger signs, and walking into horror scenes like an overqualified usher.
By the time people start dying, you don’t feel tension so much as mild curiosity about what the killer will do next. It’s less “Oh no, Angela!” and more, “Okay, that’s kill number… what are we at now?”
The Eye-Eating Killer: All Gimmick, No Soul
Our murderer, credited as the “eye-eating killer,” should be an instant cult icon. Black gloves, trench coat, a jar full of eyeballs, and a taste for gouging out peepers while a thriller plays on the big screen—this is slasher villain 101, with extra crunch.
But that’s the problem: he’s basically a walking fetish for giallo tropes. He dresses like he escaped from a forgotten Italian VHS, but there’s nothing going on behind the sunglasses. We get no real motivation, no personality quirks beyond “likes eyes,” and no sense of who this guy is beyond “murderous creep with time to kill and access to a metal bar.”
The one moment where he almost becomes interesting—chewing his own severed eye in front of the survivors—is so over-the-top it tips from disturbing into “okay, edgelord, we get it.” It feels less like horror and more like a middle-school drawing in the back of a math notebook. Shocking, sure. Meaningful? Not so much.
Death by Style, Not by Suspense
To be fair, the kills are… creative. Heads skewered by the metal bar. Eyes removed and bottled like grotesque maraschino cherries. Angela’s skull smashed against the projector until the machine is painted red. On a purely practical-effects level, the film shows up to work.
The problem is everything around the gore. There’s almost no buildup, no sustained dread. Characters wander off alone because the script demands it, not because it makes any sense. The murders often feel like isolated set pieces stitched together, rather than escalations in a tense game of cat and mouse.
Even the idea that the audience is oblivious to the killings while the movie plays could have been a brilliant meta-joke about passive spectatorship. Instead, it’s barely explored. People scream, the projector cuts out, Ana fiddles with the film and misreads panic as complaints. That’s a decent gag once. The movie treats it like an entire strategy.
Ana, Tomás, and the Art of Almost Caring
Ana eventually discovers the carnage and teams up with Angela and the sneaky kid, Tomás. This is where we should lock into their survival story, finally given a trio to root for. But Angela gets dispatched in a particularly nasty way almost immediately, and we’re left with Ana and the terrified boy.
Their dynamic could have been the emotional core: traumatized kid, wounded but determined adult, both trapped in a literal and metaphorical dying cinema. Instead, their relationship never develops beyond “She’s nice to him, he looks scared.” When Ana tells him to wait for the police and then drags a metal bar out of two corpses like she’s rearranging furniture, it should be a big “she’s hardened by horror” moment. It just feels like another task on her shift.
By the time she finally kills the killer—stabbing him through the chest from behind with the bar after being stabbed herself—it’s more a relief that the movie’s wrapping up than a triumphant payoff. The jar of eyes shattering and rolling everywhere is a solid visual, but again, it’d land harder if we cared about any of the people those eyes belonged to.
Pacing: From Slow Burn to Just… Slow
For a film that runs under two hours and takes place almost entirely in one building, The Last Matinee manages to feel weirdly sluggish. Scenes linger without deepening anything, and between the kills there’s often nothing but wandering, a bit of projector business, and the vague sense that the story is marking time until its next eyeball close-up.
Good slashers keep a rhythm: tension, release, character beat, scare, repeat. This one feels like it threw all the beats into a blender and hoped atmosphere would cover the gaps. Spoiler: it doesn’t. There are stretches where you’re less on the edge of your seat and more checking your own mental runtime.
Style Over Substance, and Style Isn’t Enough
You can see what Maximiliano Contenti is aiming for: a retro horror homage steeped in grainy visuals, old-school practical gore, and a love of the theatrical experience. There are moments where that comes through—the flicker of the projector, the claustrophobic darkness of the theater, the surreal image of an empty auditorium full of dead bodies no one noticed in time.
But the movie leans so hard on homage that it forgets to be its own thing. It’s like a mixtape of favorite moments from other films, played through a decent sound system but with no new tracks. If you grew up on giallo and ’80s slashers, you’ll recognize all the ingredients. You just might wish there was more cooking and less posing.
Final Credits: A Matinee You Can Skip
In the end, The Last Matinee feels like a horror fan film with a budget: lovingly assembled, visually competent, and utterly in thrall to its influences—but hollow where it counts. It’s not aggressively terrible, just aggressively undercooked. The pieces are there for something sharp and memorable: the decaying theater, the projectionist daughter, the meta-setting of a movie about a movie killing its audience.
Instead, we get a parade of anonymous victims, a cartoonishly one-note killer, and a lot of eyeball business that never quite adds up to real terror or real emotion.
If you absolutely must see every giallo-inspired slasher ever made, this will be a mildly diverting curiosity—something to throw on in the background while you scroll your phone and occasionally look up to say, “Oh hey, another eye.” For everyone else, this is one matinee you can safely kill and leave behind.
