Vera Miao’s tremendous horror debut explores thorny historical truths that refuse to stay buried
Recovering from the sudden death of her husband, cellist instructor Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) aims to start fresh in Rock Springs, Wyoming with her daughter Grace (Aria Kim) and her mother-in-law, Grace’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu). But their isolated suburban home is nestled against a sprawling forest locals furtively avoid–both for its ties to the town’s violent, racist past as well as its present rumors of mysterious creatures lurking within its borders. As the seventh Lunar Month approaches, when Chinese folklore holds that spirits may cross into the living world, the ghosts of the past begin making themselves known to Emily’s family at their terrifying peril.
Equally drawing on traditional Chinese folklore, slow-burn horror cinema, and all-too-real historical atrocities, writer-director Vera Miao’s debut feature Rock Springs showcases her remarkable versatility in tackling disparate kinds of horror within a singular, limited runtime. Told in three distinct acts from different characters’ perspectives across both moments and centuries, Miao elegantly leads us through a spine-tingling, dread-laden opening chapter before taking us through a disturbing and visceral historical reenactment that’s as much Come and See as it is Heaven’s Gate, before swerving into creature feature and ghost story territory. That these chapters feel visually and tonally distinct yet organically unified speaks to Miao’s skill, each mode of horror striking a different chord while preparing us for the next unpredictable turn. The film’s sound design augments Miao’s deeply haunting approach, rich with suffocating echoes and dissonant, earthy tones that make the audience feel caught in a spectral trap with horrors that are impossible to pinpoint yet are deeply, unshakably felt. Much of Rock Springs‘ thrill lies in not knowing where it’s headed–yet Miao confidently, urgently leads us into a terrifying and necessary darkness.
Each chapter also gradually reveals the true nature of Rock Springs’ three central characters and the unique horrors each faces–invisible to the other characters and to us until we finally experience events through their own perspective. The childlike innocence of Kim’s Grace teases out a creepy haunted house story through the lens of awkward childhood experiences of new homes and community; a flashback centers Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong), a Chinese immigrant miner who becomes one of many violent casualties in Rock Springs’ buried violent past. This historical tragedy, deepened by Nai Nai’s belief in hungry ghosts, recontextualizes odd moments from Grace’s story while adding dimension to the film’s climax–which hinges on Kelly Marie Tran’s powerhouse performance as Emily.
I can’t underline enough how Tran’s performance is my favorite out of this year’s SXSW lineup. Rich with combative, world-weary vitality, Tran plays Emily as a mother fraying at the edges, juggling unexpected tragedy, casual racism from her majority-white neighbors, and her own complex identity as a Vietnamese woman widowed into a Chinese family and its deeply-held traditions–not to mention the “gift” of psychic sight–all while desperately trying to live up to everyone’s expectations of her as a caregiving and breadwinning mother and daughter-in-law. Every waking moment for Emily is a living hell, rife with towering legacies and inherited burdens she never asked for yet cannot refuse. Yet Tran’s Emily endures the trials imposed upon her by ghosts personal and historical, clinging to hope and life in equal measure even as it kills her to do so. It’s so easy for her to give up–but Emily becomes a force of nature by confronting the lingering dead rather than giving into the temptation to join them outright.
Beyond Tran’s revelatory performance, Rock Springs’ greatest strength is how Miao uses genre and Chinese folklore to cast a damning light on forgotten historical atrocities–namely the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre, in which dozens of Chinese immigrants were murdered or injured by a white mob as their homes were burnt to the ground. Miao’s reenactment doesn’t flinch from the racial violence at the core of this incident, yet never sensationalizes it or reduces victims to mere symbols. Historical trauma is handled with the nuanced character work of a Kelly Reichardt film, foregrounding individual humanity and lived experience without collapsing identity into limiting definitions of victimhood. The film’s central creature brings this repressed past screaming and crawling into the present, acting as a visceral metaphor for how time collapses the fading memory of individual victims into a writhing, identity-stripped mass in death–much as racism, displacement, and the pressures of assimilation threaten to collapse distinct lives into hegemony or otherization in life.
Unearthing the past doesn’t just exhume monstrous actions that dominant communities and cultures would rather keep buried: Miao suggests it also helps us define and exorcise the demons of our present, both individual and collective. This overwhelming ethos transforms Rock Springs into a horror film about how the silent past is never truly past or silent; it often screams for relevance and remembrance from beyond–and that it’s terrifyingly necessary for us to listen.
Rock Springs had its Texas Premiere at SXSW 2026. The film is currently seeking distribution.
