{Movie Review} Diabolic (2026) or The Autopsy of Jane Jessup.

Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic announces itself with a cold open that feels less like a scene and more like an assault. The camera submerges with its subject, looking up through baptismal water as hands press, bodies loom, and faith becomes something actively violent. It is immediately clear that this film understands religion not as abstraction but as a physical experience. Belief has weight here. Literally, it pushes down on your chest. It fills your lungs. That opening image lingers, and not just because it is technically impressive, though it absolutely is. It lingers because it reframes baptism as horror without losing its sincerity. This is not mockery of religion. Perhaps it a warning about it. Or maybe even its an acknowledgement of fundamental (pun intentional) power.

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Diabolic is explicit in its engagement with LDS fundamentalism, and that specificity is the film’s greatest strength. The compound Elise fled is not a vague culty backdrop. It is a recognizable, rigorously constructed system of control that mirrors real world offshoot communities and survivor accounts. Daily rituals, gendered expectations, and the quiet violence of obedience are depicted with an unnerving normalcy. The film invites comparison to memoirs like Escape by Carolyn Jessup, a woman who fled such a compound, not because Diabolic is adapting those experiences directly but because it shares their observational sharpness. This is horror grounded in the systems that created it. How people live. How power is enforced. How belief becomes power.

Elizabeth Cullen gives a deeply vulnerable performance as Elise, a woman pulled back to the place that broke her because something worse followed her out. She is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a cursed witch, but the film smartly refuses to treat the supernatural threat as separate from the trauma of her upbringing. The haunting is not random. It is targeted. Elise’s return to the compound feels less like a plot contrivance and more like an act of self harm disguised as hope. From a purely logical standpoint, the decision to go back will frustrate some viewers. The instinct to scream “leave” kicks in early and never fully goes away. But Diabolic is not interested in characters making smart horror movie choices. It is interested in characters making emotionally accurate ones.

Visually, the film is confident to the point of confrontation. The baptismal font room is a standout, all stone, shadow, and gothic severity. It feels lifted from a different era of horror filmmaking, recalling classic religious imagery while remaining grounded in this specific belief system. Phillips leans heavily on eye contact as a visual motif. Eyes meeting eyes. Gazes held too long. Authority asserted through being seen and the violence both real and ontological that systems reinforce. This choice pays off because Diabolic is, very intentionally, a queer coming of age story. Not coded. Not implied. Explicit. Elise’s queerness is central to her alienation from the compound and to the witch’s fixation on her. The film understands queerness and coming out not as a metaphor layered onto the horror but as one of its engines.

The lighting during these scenes is oppressive and sickly, pushing the image toward something hallucinatory without losing spatial coherence. Horror fans will immediately clock the influence of The Dark Song, particularly in how ritual is framed as endurance rather than enlightenment. Faith here is not comforting. It is punishing.

Trad Wives and Trad Effects

Midway through the first act, Diabolic delivers a practical effects reveal that will make genre fans sit up and grin. The membrane work is spectacular and viscerally gross, a reminder that good horror lives in texture. This is where the film fully commits to its body horror instincts, and it never really looks back. The final ten minutes, in particular, feel designed as a gift to gore hounds. Blood flows. Bodies transform. Consequences arrive loudly.

The film stumbles a bit in its second act, which pivots sharply toward Elise’s present day relationship. Adam, her partner, is both an emotional antagonist and also thematic dead weight, and the film knows it. He represents safety that feels conditional and love that comes with expectations Elise cannot meet. The problem is not that Adam sucks (though he does). The problem is that spending time with him drains energy from the story. Once Diabolic makes his function clear, the film regains momentum. Before that, it risks getting bogged down in a relationship that feels intentionally hollow but still demands too much screen time.

The editing, however, remains sharp throughout. Phillips and his editor frequently link timelines through objects rather than dialogue, creating quiet rhymes between Elise’s past and present. A door in the compound echoes a door in her apartment. A ritual object resurfaces in a mundane context. These connections reinforce the film’s central idea that escape is not erasure. You carry the architecture of trauma with you, even when you leave the systems that created it.

The witch herself is an effective and unsettling presence. Visually, she sits somewhere between traditional folk horror and Francis Dolarhyde. She is not a ghost floating through walls. She is a force that wants something. And what she wants is tied directly to Elise’s queerness and the repression that shaped her.

Diabolic ultimately succeeds because it understands that religious horror works best when it is specific, angry, and intimate. It embraces the aesthetics of trad wife mythmaking only to rot them from the inside. The film’s climax hinges explicitly on Elise’s queerness, framing it not as something to be punished but as something powerful and dangerous to systems built on control. That choice gives the ending real teeth. That being said the entire film is pretty bleak. Leaving us without much hope.

This is not a perfect film, but it is a committed one. Diabolic is messy, confrontational, and deeply sincere in its anger. It wants you uncomfortable. It wants you thinking about how belief scars the body and likely soul. And it absolutely wants your blood.

Check out Diabolic when it eeleases In select theaters and on demand on February 20.