Critic Reviews

• Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

  Effective atmospherics don't rescue this formulaic slasher flick.

• Paul Brunick, New York Times

  I'd sooner touch a nine-volt battery to my tongue than sit through this film again.

• Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

  Bereavement -- miraculously as dull as its title -- is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.

• John Anderson, Newsday

  Virtually every shot in Bereavement -- a sort of prequel to Mena's Malevolence (2005) -- is the right one; the editing, also by Mena, is first-rate.

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  This is an example of what happens when a clever, proficient filmmaker falls in love with brutal trash.

• Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

  while Bereavement is certainly a slasher, it is also a film about how monsters are made, in which every character, hero and villain alike, is figured as tragic prey to genes and circumstance.

• Scott Weinberg, FEARnet

  Evidence of a group of filmmakers who take their horror seriously.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Palinesque, bland and increasingly silly with oodles of unintentional humor instead of what every horror fan expects: palpable scares.

• Ethan Alter, NYC Film Critic

  Gruesome in the moment, but your memory of it is easily wiped clean.

• Duane Dudek, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  "Bereavement" is cruel and unusual.

• Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine

  The film is so laughably Freudian it could play as a parody of certain acclaimed horror film studies such as Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Horror Film.

• Rob Thomas, Capital Times (Madison, WI)

  "Bereavement" isn't a bad slasher film, but after a few stabs (no pun intended) at being something more, it settles for being just a slasher film. And that's disappointing.

• Maitland McDonagh, Film Journal International

  In this deliberately paced horror movie, a big-city teen homes in on the darkness at the edge of a small Pennsylvania town, with grim results.

• Steve "Uncle Creepy" Barton, Dread Central

  It truly plays like one person's nightmarish descent into a world of total madness. It gives you a feel for who Martin Bristol is and why he's so lethal. On that level the film is a complete success.

• Christian Toto, What Would Toto Watch?

  Bereavement is one nasty piece of work.

• Harvey S. Karten, Compuserve

  It's difficult to care about people who are all stupid to a fault.

• Dustin Putman, DustinPutman.com

  A character-centric thriller signifying Mena's progression as a filmmaker even as it doesn't quite retain the same home-grown charm and earnestness of its predecessor.

• Prairie Miller, NewsBlaze

  Though Mena refers to his sadistically sliced up female brisket as therapeutic, there's a line between calming viewer fears, and titillating them. While human chopped meat served up raw making you go vegetarian, isn't exactly relished food for thought.

Read all 18 critic reviews