There’s a moment early in “The Serpent’s Skin” when Anna, our quietly magnetic protagonist, dismisses Alice Cooper’s latter-day cultural grumpiness with a single, perfectly calibrated line: “We’ll always have ‘Teenage Frankenstein.'” It’s a throwaway beat. Blink and you lose it. But it tells you everything about what director Alice Maio Mackay is doing here, raiding the attic of mainstream pop culture for the good stuff, the stuff that still crackles with electricity, and leaving the rest to rot.
I’ve been thinking about that line all week.
Mackay is twenty-two years old and already making films that feel like they were assembled in a fever dream by someone who grew up watching “Buffy” reruns at 2 a.m. while mainlining early-era Spider-Man comics and dog-eared copies of Carrie. “The Serpent’s Skin” is lo-fi to its bones — you can see the seams, the stretched budget, the occasional rough edge and it doesn’t care even slightly that you can. It wears its cheapness the way a teenager wears a band tee: not as an apology, but as a declaration.
Alexandra McVicker plays Anna, a young trans woman who moves to the city to live with her sister and almost immediately falls into the gravitational pull of everyone around her. Her hot tattoo-covered neighbor Danny (Jordan Dulieu) is in a band. The tattoo that just reads “F—k Trump” — that’s the film letting you know whose side it’s on, and it’s not subtle about it, and it doesn’t need to be. Anna lands a job at a record store, and when it’s robbed, she discovers she can make the robber’s brain scream and his eyes bleed just by looking at him hard enough. In “Scanners” they’d call this scanning. Here it’s called “popping,” which is somehow both funnier and more menacing. The film offers a “Matrix”-style explanation for how this works, something about life as a video game and certain people being able to hack it, and then wisely moves on, because the metaphysics aren’t the point. The feeling is the point.
Recommended: She Dances Parents Guide
Anna meets Gen (Avalon Fast), a tattoo artist who shares her abilities, and the two of them start doing the most charming socially responsible vigilante work I’ve ever seen on screen: burning TERF flyers with their minds, telekinetically plucking cigarettes from the lips of pregnant strangers. It’s funny. It’s warm. It has the specific texture of something that actually means something to the person who made it.
At eighty-three minutes, “The Serpent’s Skin” doesn’t feel rushed so much as winningly unbothered. Plot threads appear and vanish, Anna’s father looting archaeological sites goes absolutely nowhere, clearly filed away for a hypothetical sequel that Mackay is already imagining, but this isn’t really an action picture and never pretends to be. It’s a hangout film. A queer superhero hangout film, which is a genre I didn’t know I needed. The film is more interested in the erotic possibilities of psychic ability than in stopping crime, and for most of its runtime, that’s more than enough.
Then the vampire shows up.
Danny remember Danny, the tattoo-covered love interest? gets possessed by some kind of demon and starts going Full Angel-from-Buffy, complete with the forehead prosthetic, seducing women and draining them. Mackay’s screenplay rushes to absolve him of responsibility almost immediately, pinning his predatory behavior on someone else’s subconscious. Which is… a choice. There’s something genuinely interesting buried in that setup a sensitive, green-flag guy revealed to harbor something darker and the film flirts with it early, in the way Danny’s kabedon flirting style carries just a faint edge of entitlement. But that thread gets dropped rather than pulled. Whether Mackay is being deliberately elliptical or simply wasn’t sure where to go with it, I genuinely couldn’t tell you. The third act stumbles in ways that feel like the cost of working fast and cheap, and also, perhaps, of reaching for something the film’s resources couldn’t quite support.
But here’s what I kept coming back to: this is a film that opens with the words “A Transgender Film by Alice Maio Mackay.” Not a film that happens to feature trans characters. Not a film with a progressive message bolted onto a genre skeleton. A transgender film. That framing isn’t incidental, it’s the entire operating principle. Mackay is building something from inside a specific experience outward, borrowing the visual grammar of mainstream fantasy and horror not to imitate it but to repossess it, the way you might buy back a family heirloom from a pawn shop and put it somewhere it actually belongs.
Recommended: The Faithful: Women of the Bible Parents Guide
So yes, the plot loses the thread. The villain’s arc feels underdeveloped. Some of it is rough in ways that even the most charitable reading of lo-fi filmmaking can’t entirely redeem. A mess, sure. But it’s a mess animated by something real, a director’s voice that’s already distinctive at this stage in her career, a lead performance from McVicker that’s got genuine gravity, and a refusal to sand down the film’s weirdness in exchange for broader appeal.
While studio machines grind out more carefully managed franchise product, Mackay is out here making films that feel like they were made by someone who had something to say and found a camera. That used to just be called cinema.
The Serpent’s Skin Parents Guide
Not yet rated by the MPA.
Violence & Intensity: This film doesn’t traffic in gore for its own sake, but what’s here is genuinely unsettling screaming inside the skull, are viscerally conceived, especially for a low-budget production. The vampire-possession storyline in the third act involves soul-draining seduction with an implicit menace that’s more psychological than graphic. Nothing approaches splatter territory, but younger or sensitive viewers will feel it.
Language: A tattoo that reads “F—k Trump” is shown on screen without apology, and the dialogue earns its edge throughout. There are profanities scattered across the runtime with the casual frequency of real conversation, not theatrical emphasis. The film also engages directly with anti-trans rhetoric, TERF ideology is referenced explicitly, which, depending on your household, may warrant a conversation before or after watching.
Sexual Content & Nudity: There are sexual encounters depicted with some nudity, treated with the matter-of-fact intimacy of indie filmmaking rather than titillation. The central romance between Anna and Gen develops with warmth and physical honesty. The villain’s predatory seductions carry a darker erotic charge that the film is clearly using critically, though it doesn’t always fully interrogate what it’s doing with that material.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Present but incidental. Characters drink socially. Cigarettes appear one scene involves telekinetically removing them from someone’s mouth, which is arguably the most anti-smoking PSA ever committed to film. Nothing is framed as aspirational.
Age Recommendation: Strictly for older teenagers and adults, seventeen and up feels right, and even then, with some awareness of the film’s themes. This isn’t a film trying to harm anyone, quite the opposite, but it’s made for a queer adult audience and assumes a certain emotional and cultural literacy that younger viewers simply may not have yet.
Recommended: Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Parents Guide
