Thanksgiving review: Eli Roth serves up a gory feast

Horror fans have been waiting more than a decade for Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth’s holiday slasher about a killer in a pilgrim mask terrorizing a small Massachusetts town. Ever since Roth’s fake trailer for the film showed up in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, we’ve been wondering what the finished version could look like, and how much Roth might lean on the vintage slasher feel of the fake trailer when it came time to make the real movie. That trailer, of course, is now the stuff of legend, with fan-favorite moments that just have to have an homage point in the movie itself.

But this isn’t just a movie made for the cinephiles and horror faithful who’ve been craving it for 16 years now. Roth also had to make a film that would satisfy casual horror viewers, moviegoers just searching for something different, and even people who buy tickets just because they think they’re in for a silly, tongue-in-cheek ride through the gorier portions of Turkey Day.

Simply put, it’s a lot to live up to, but like a good Thanksgiving spread, the film arrives with a little something for just about everyone who’s interested in seeing it. Packed with memorable kills, knowing winks, and a playful slasher whodunit plot, Thanksgiving is a horror feast worth sitting through, even if it never exactly pushes beyond the bounds of its central hook.

A year ago on Thanksgiving night, the small town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, was rocked by tragedy when a Black Friday sale gone wrong led to a riot at the local department store. Several people died, several others were traumatized, and yet by next Thanksgiving, much of the town seems ready to move on. One person who’s not ready is Jessica (Nell Verlaque), whose father owns the store where the riot went down. Jessica’s life has never been the same since her mother died, leaving her with a new stepmother she doesn’t trust, a father who’s thrown himself into work, and a group of friends who seem to have forgotten just how close they were to the Thanksgiving tragedy in the first place. By virtue of her father’s ownership, Jessica and her friends Gabby (Addison Rae), Lonnie (Mika Amonsen), Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Yulia (Jenna Warren), and Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) were all inside the store, taunting the customers waiting outside by buying stuff early. Then the doors broke open, blood started spilling, and things changed forever.

But Jessica’s not the only one who remembers how awful things were. It turns out there’s another person in Plymouth who’s all too connected to those tragic events, so connected that he’s ready to take revenge by donning the costume of the town’s first governor, John Carver, and go around playing killer Pilgrim. If she and her friends are going to survive, Jessica has to find out who’s behind the killings with the help of the town sheriff (Patrick Dempsey), and a group of friends who aren’t necessarily super dialed into her concerns.

Roth wastes no time digging right into the blood and guts promised by Thanksgiving’s years-long buildup. We get a brief prologue showing the degeneration of that Thanksgiving night into a brutal riot, then we rocket forward to one year later, where the killer known as the Carver is already hard at work on making Thanksgiving miserable for an unlucky few. Roth’s briskness, and the conciseness of the storytelling in Jeff Rendell’s script, mean that we push right into the good stuff without ever really feeling lost or concerned that we’re missing something. A film that runs just past the 100-minute mark feels like a brisk, invigorating 80-minute slasher ride, and that alone is a solid indicator of Thanksgiving’s success.

But you didn’t come here to talk about pacing. You come to a film like this for the gore, and even by Eli Roth’s standards he may have outdone himself this time. The marquee kills, as the Thanksgiving trailers have shown, are of course themed around Thanksgiving holiday tools and weapons, from meat tenderizers to carving knives to, yes, corn-on-the-cob holders, but the inventiveness does not begin and end with gimmicky weapons. Roth creates a slasher who knows exactly how to use his surroundings to his advantage, setting up unexpected kills and jump scares with the ease of a seasoned pro. No matter how much you think you can call the shots of this movie based on the footage you’ve already seen, you’ll still find something you never saw coming.

What you will see coming, though, is the rough outline of the plot, which plays like dozens of other slasher whodunits before it. We’re not ready to call that a drawback for the film, though. Yes, some viewers might get stuck in the predictability of certain story elements, or wish more character development could rise up in the place of certain standard slasher beats, but we’re not just watching lazy storytellers at work here. We’re watching horror pros slice and dice their way through a tried-and-true formula, and doing it very well indeed. There’s something comfortable to the rhythm of it all, to the lunacy of a town unraveling under the weight of a series of slasher killings, and if you can find that comfort it’ll feel like a warm seat at a Thanksgiving table.

That’s thanks in no small part to the film’s cast, who know exactly the kind of movie they’re in and embrace it to the fullest. Rae’s gotten a lot of press as one of the film’s key stars by virtue of her TikTok fame, and while she handles herself well, it’s Verlaque who proves to be the true star. She’s got all the right ingredients for a solid horror Final Girl, and she brings them to every scene of the film. With the work of a great ensemble at her back, she becomes a scream queen before our very eyes.

By the end of Thanksgiving, horror fans who’ve been waiting years for Roth to finally deliver on the promise of that legendary fake trailer will find all kinds of reasons to be satisfied and stuffed to the gills with horror fun, as will casual fans just looking for thrills over the holidays. Once you find the film’s rhythm, it’ll carry you away like plate after plate of turkey and dressing, until you roll out of the theater happy, full, and looking forward to the next time you can feast on its delights.

Thanksgiving opens in theaters November 17