There’s a scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Lila, a sheltered city girl whose minimal script development leads us to believe is troubled but who may also be a victim of her sister’s emotional abuse more than anything else, confronts Richter, a coal-rolling gun-toting mechanic who is deeply anxious about the pernicious influence of invasive species why he’s such a nihilist and he acts very confused by the question.

She clarifies that his fume-spewing truck is hastening the climate apocalypse and he diverts this with a paean about how he doesn’t like being told what to do. Of course this isn’t an answer at all. But this is because asking Richter why he’s nihilistic, in the context of this film, is somewhat akin to asking a fish why it is wet.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre hates all its characters, except perhaps Leatherface, so completely that they can’t help but be nihilistic. They exist only to die. This creates a problem of sympathy. You have none for any character except the man who wanders around wearing the recently sliced off face of his dead guardian and silently murdering every person he encounters with brutal efficiency. While watching the film I struggled to even gather what these sketches of American failure were named. I never caught Ruth’s name at all prior to her death, nor Richter’s. I figured out Dante’s name 30 seconds before Leatherface began killing him. As is often the case in Texas Chainsaw movies the deaths of our protagonists tend to be drawn out affairs that focus on the total abjection of the subject and this is definitely the case here even if this is realised principally via a tendency for apparently dead characters to come back to life long enough to move the plot forward slightly before fully expiring.

The setup for this instalment of Texas Chainsaw is that Leatherface disappeared after the events of the first film. OG final girl Sally Hardesty became a Texas Marshall and spent the intervening years hunting for the killer but unsuccessfully. As one character points out, it’s hard to catch somebody when you don’t know what they looked like and Leatherface wears a mask.

Our protagonists blunder into this hunt in the form of a car-full of enterprising urban investors who have worked with a bank to purchase (almost) all of a ghost town in rural Texas with the idea of creating a millennial outpost of Austin where they can create a kind of liberal utopia.

They are stopped by a creepy sheriff who encourages them to be respectful of the locals and of course promise to do so. There’s a sense of racial tension around the scene as Dante appears to be the leader of the thrust to gentrify the ghost town and he is also black. The sheriff eases up on his, “y’all best move along” act when Melody, the emotionally abusive older sister, speaks up to mention she was originally from the region.

Things devolve when the gang arrive in town and discover a tattered Confederate battle flag hanging outside a dilapidated orphenage. Dante insists it has to come down because it would upset the investors and he rushes into the supposedly abandoned building to find that the proprietor is still living there: a very frail old woman. Also a resident is one final charge of hers who she insists requires special care and who cannot possibly handle the world outside.

The protagonists argue with the woman over the flag in the process of which she says some remarkably racist things and the situation devolves to the point where the police are called to remove her. Dante is quite certain he owns the building and that she was supposed to be gone already. She insists it was merely a mix-up with the bank and that she still has the deed. The stress of the altercation causes the old woman to have a heart attack and the police drag her out without her oxygen tank to take her to the closest hospital. Her last charge goes with her. She dies en-route thus reigniting Leatherface’s blood lust.

It should be obvious by this point that we shouldn’t like any of these people. The locals suck. The old woman (apparently named Mrs. Mc) is a racist old piece of crap. Luther is the worst possible example of a good ol’ boy. The police are racist, hostile to outsiders but also quite willing to drag an ailing woman out of her home without her medical equipment because somebody with the backing of a bank said so. The city liberals may be remarkably devoid of racism and sexism but they reek of un-earned self-righteousness. They are an invasive gentrifying force collaborating with a bank to push out the poor hicks left behind by American decline in order to create a party-town for Austinites who want to LARP small-town life. They assume they own the orphanage when it transpires Mrs. Mc is right and she remains the rightful owner and they act upon that assumed ownership with arrogant self-assuredness.

A line from the trailer involves a bunch of people on a party bus photographing Leatherface as he revs his chainsaw. One of them says, “Try anything and you’re cancelled bro.” It stirred up a lot of discourse on Twitter for how fucking cringe the line is. And it’s not any better in context. Except, like every single line of dialog in this film it serves a singular purpose: to make you hate all these people.

This movie attempts to create a microcosm of American culture in the town of Harlow and then to show every single person within that microcosm as being beneath contempt. There’s not a single person worthy of even the slightest ounce of sympathy.

This is good because they will receive none. Over the course of the film Leatherface kills them all. Leatherface, who never speaks a line, is the only one we see experience a sincere emotion other than anger or fear when he grieves the death of Mrs. Mc. The fact that he then cuts off her face to wear as a mask is neither here nor there. The gaze of the camera allows us to sympathise with him before allowing him to terrorise and dispatch the police and Ruth. This movie seems all over the place because it displays such obvious contempt for the racism, insularity and ignorance of our hicks in the very same scene that it shows us the arrogance, selfishness and hypocrisy of our urban liberals. But when Sally re-enters the scene it tips its hand and this scattered opening with its uniformly detestable and largely forgettable protagonists becomes clear.

By the time Sally discovers Leatherface is back almost everyone is dead. Only Mel and Lila remain. Sally traps them at gunpoint and uses them as bait to draw Leatherface out. She confronts him demanding recognition but she doesn’t get it. Leatherface doesn’t remember her even as she’s devoted her whole life to hunting him down. He impales her with a chainsaw. It is a cutting rebuke for how recent Halloween films have used Laurie Strode. There’s no redemption to be found in a cathartic exorcism of trauma here. It’s just another avenue for cruelty.

The kills in this movie are uniformly excellent. There’s a flat physicality that this movie successfully inherits from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Being murdered hurts. And we see many people suffer extremes of abjection that never spill over into farce. Some people run and die. Some people fight and die. Some people scream and cower and die. Some people never even see death coming. But, uniformly, when death comes, it sucks. The kills aren’t the sort of ironic nods of Jason’s later ventures nor are they the almost farcical theatrics of the Scream series. They’re brutal, beautifully executed, and drive home that each one is the ending of something that is better off gone.

The bus massacre is particularly well-executed as Leatherface cuts his way through a massive crowd of people who scream and ineffectually try to run from him as he cuts them down one by one with his saw. It reminded me most of the Darth Vader corridor murder from Rogue One – or rather the Darth Vader horror movie that some Star Wars fans wished could follow from that scene. Here it is. An implacable man in a mask, wielding a technologically augmented blade, cutting down a host of confined victims who are entirely unable to protect themselves. Bon appetite.

Leatherface has been powered up a bit in this, able to shrug off multiple stab wounds, shotgun blasts and even a taste of his own saw. He is also strong enough to bring a moving bus to a stop… somehow. He’s also a silent implacable killer. It may be the case that Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees have their origin from him but it is equally true that this iteration of him is influenced by contemporary portrayals of Michael and Jason. Leatherface isn’t a crazy guy in a mask (well he is but he isn’t only a crazy guy in a mask) he is an unstoppable force of annihilation.

After Leatherface kills Sally there is a final confrontation in which Mel and Lila attempt to put him to rest. They almost seem to succeed but this turns out to be a fake-out and the movie ends with Leatherface cutting Mel’s head off and swing it wildly around with his chainsaw as Lila, facing backward out the sunroof of a moving car screams to her vehicular death. Nobody survives.

Nobody deserves to survive.

In the end, Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks at this microcosm of America it constructs and says the only thing to do is to chop it to bits with a chainsaw. America deserves the abjection experienced in the slow deaths of Dante, Mel and Lila but abjection is not redemptive as it is in much of the slasher genre. There’s no redemption here. There is harrowing and there is the grave.