{Movie Review} Affection (2025)

BT Meza’s feature debut opens in media res, and that’s exactly the right call. You’re dropped mid-crisis, a woman face-down in the road next to a wrecked car, already seizing, already getting hit by the next one that comes through. Before you’ve had time to ask whether this is a possession film or a hit-and-run, Jessica Rothe is already doing the heavy lifting. She wakes up in a house she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she doesn’t know, with a daughter (Julianna Layne) who calls her mom, and the film’s central horror clicks into place fast: her name is Ellie, apparently, and this is apparently her life. The ambiguity is intentional, and it works.

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What follows, at least for a while, is a slow and uncomfortable collapse of identity. Ellie becomes a wife. A mother. Defined entirely by her function to the people around her. There’s a Taming of the Shrew energy running under the first half, and not in a cute way, the kind of thing the film clearly has opinions about without ever quite saying so out loud. The color palette is doing its part, a sepia-tinged yellowish-green wash over everything that makes the domestic spaces feel a little sick, a little wrong, before anything explicitly wrong has happened. Smart production design from Nicholas Faiella and art direction from Kevin Cabello keep the house staged just slightly too perfectly, curated for someone else’s life. The score threads through it all with alarm-like synths that carry a Tarantino-adjacent quality, keeping you on edge without tipping into overkill.

Rothe carries a tremendous amount of physical storytelling here, and she does not underplay it. It would be easy to. She doesn’t. There is a sequence in the woods early on that is among the better set pieces you’ll see this year, the kind of moment that earns its dread from almost nothing. Anyone who wandered into the woods as a kid knows what a stray piece of plastic looks like. It shouldn’t be scary. Holy shit is it scary. The imagery lands with the particular wrongness of something familiar made monstrous, and Rothe is right there in the middle of it, giving the whole thing an anchor. Cross’s Bruce is a complete chode from frame one, intentionally or not, creepy in a way the film clearly needs him to be. Layne as Alice is asked to do one thing and does it well, spending most of the film at a steady simmer of frightened, which is exactly what the story requires of her. But this is Rothe’s movie, full stop, and she earns every bit of that weight.

Full disclosure: at the 37-minute mark, I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on where the film takes you, and for Affection it mostly pays off. The problem is what comes next. A pretty substantial exposition dump around the midpoint undercuts a lot of the earned mystery, and the mid-film monologue that delivers it could stand to trust the audience a bit more.

What follows that dump is bleak as hell, and here’s where Meza’s instincts get genuinely interesting. Makeup artist Lia Parks leads the practical effects work, and it is sharp and genuinely disgusting in the best way. This isn’t a lo-fi production. Real money was spent making it feel polished, and the soft science fiction premise benefits from that investment in ways that start to feel almost Cronenbergian in the back half, even if the influences stay in the background. The third act drags some as the twist plays out, but the final stretch leans hard into the grief metaphor the film has been building toward . The O. Henry-inspired ending reframes everything, and the question it leaves you with is the question the whole movie has really been about: how much would you do to protect/keep your family?

It’s worth pausing on the fact that this is Meza’s first film. 2026 has quietly shaped up to be a strong year for debut directors in horror, between Curry Barker’s indee darling Obsession and Kane Parsons break out Backrooms. Meza doesn’t have that kind of platform or those kinds of resources, but what he does with what he has is legitimate. The ambition is real, the craft is present, and Rothe is clearly a collaborator who pushed the material further than the script alone might have taken it. First features are allowed to have rough edges. Affection has a few, but they’re worth tolerating.

Affection isn’t a perfect film. The pacing stumbles and the second act earns its lumps. But Rothe is exceptional, the woods scene alone is worth the watch, and the grief metaphor lands with more weight than most horror films this year manage to even attempt. Affection is well worth your time.

Affection arrives On Demand June 5, 2026 via Brainstorm Media. Written and directed by BT Meza. Starring Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, and Julianna Layne.