Mannequins are peak uncanny valley, and that’s been my opinion since I was old enough to wander Macy’s and other department stores with my grandma. Their perfect bodies were too sleek, and often without heads, hands, or feet. Looking at them deeply unsettled me, and somehow, writer/director John Berardo was able to resurrect that feeling tenfold in his new film The Mannequin, which had its East Coast Premiere at Popcorn Frights 2025. This supernatural slasher, while uneven at times, is unsettling, heartbreaking, and disgusting.
Sophia (Gabriella Rivera) is a fashion designer who just purchased a factory building in Los Angeles, where she plans to launch her fashion line. Helping her set up her new workspace is her sister Liana (Isabella Gomez) and friends Hazel (Lindsay LaVancy) and Nadine (Shireen Lai). After a night of drinking, Sophia is left alone in the building and comes to realize why exactly the rent was so cheap: it’s haunted by the ghost of a serial killer who claimed the lives of female models in this very building. Even from beyond the grave, he claims another victim, and the next morning, Liana discovers Sophia’s bloody, lifeless body.
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Flash forward to a year later, and Liana has returned to Los Angeles after fleeing to Europe in the wake of her grief. She’s moving back into the very factory building where her sister was murdered. Hazel and Nadine find it strange, but they’re just glad she’s back in town. As a year of resentment boils over, disturbing acts of violence break out amongst the three women, from self-mutilation to aggressive attacks on others. They decide to take matters into their own hands to fight back against whatever—or whoever—haunts the building as they discover the horrible history of this very building.
The dynamics between both the friends and the sisters are what make The Mannequin so effective. This feels like a real friend group with decades of history, and these sisters bicker like actual siblings, constantly picking at each other out of love and frustration. It makes their subsequent torture all the more heart-wrenching as their bodies are controlled by something evil in the warehouse’s walls. Important to note is that these relationships are at the story’s forefront, meaning the violence, while shocking, does take a backseat. This writer found it effective, albeit surprising for a film like this; a film like The Mannequin feels like it could be B-movie sleaze. And yet, Berardo delivers something rather different here.
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While the stylized black-and-white cold open is visually striking, the sudden transition to the present slows the pacing and is a bit disorienting. The events set in the present set the context well enough, but the cold open does illustrate Berardo’s skills in different formats and styles. But once the action really starts, The Mannequin tells a disturbing story about a mannequin with a violent past. Even with a relatively low body count, the slasher still delivers some troubling set pieces, complete with eyes that seem detached from the optical nerve whenever someone is possessed. Their possessed appearance mimics that uncanny fear I felt in my belly whenever I walked past a mannequin in a department store.
The Mannequin is a standout supernatural slasher in a world that’s seeing a resurgence in the subgenre. Berardo adopts familiar tropes and twists them into something that feels fresh, thanks especially to a perfectly cast ensemble of female actors. If you’re going to put a creepy slasher on your Halloween watchlist, I highly recommend this one.
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