SXSW Review: “Rock Springs”

Rock Springs (Vera Miao, 2026) 2½ out of 5 stars

Writer/director Vera Miao’s debut feature, Rock Springs, has a lot of important things to say. Horror is an especially good format in which to comment on the problems of the real world, allowing as it does for the tropes of the genre to ease our way into deeper thoughts. Sadly, while Miao tackles urgent historical issues that very much inform the universe of today, the script and mise-en-scène prove too on-the-nose to prove affecting, and the ostensibly scary parts are just … not.

Divided into three chapters, Rock Springs starts in the here and now, with widowed mom Emily (Kelly Marie Tran, Control Freak) moving into a house in Rock Springs, Wyoming, accompanied by her mother-in-law Nai Nai (Fiona Fu, Lucky Lu) and daughter Gracie (Aria Kim). Emily is there to teach cello at the local community college. Everyone is understandably depressed at the recent passing of their husband/son/father but tries to make do. It doesn’t help that the Chinese Nai Nai insists on speaking in her native language to Emily, who is Vietnamese American. Inevitably, it’s a very one-sided conversation.

Nai Nai also insists that this was not the best time to move, given that it is the month of ghosts on the Chinese lunar calendar. But here they are. Emily keeps imagining that she sees her deceased spouse and Gracie keeps hearing creepy sounds in the woods. Perhaps it’s all in their imagination.

Or not, as the case may be, for in the second chapter we learn about the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre, when local whites, filled with racist hatred and unhappy with what they saw as job competition, attacked a group of Chinese coal miners, killing many. This part of the movie—starring, among others, Benedict Wong (Weapons)—though filled with violence and hard to watch, is by far the strongest section. Miao shows a sure directorial hand in the staging. This may be a ghost story, but the least supernatural scenes are the most frightening of all.

Back in the present, Miao does less well. Poor Tran has to do a lot of the work missing from the script to convey fear, and what menace there is on screen fails to terrify. In fact, some of the effects provoke something close to laughter. Worse, there are no real stakes once we learn the target of the ghosts’ ire. Nai Nai calls them “hungry ghosts,” but really, they are just melancholy. We feel their pain, but not much else.

The town of Rock Springs itself is also never fully established beyond serving as a narrative device. The few residents we meet (other than the killers of the middle sequence) are mere constructs. I get that Miao’s dramatic concerns lie elsewhere, but without three-dimensional grounding in something, much of the structure drifts. What happened in 1885 deserves its own feature-length, standalone treatment, perhaps as a documentary. Rock Springs tries, but never quite does that tragedy full justice.