Sundance ‘26: ‘ROCK SPRINGS’ Excises The Ghosts of A Not-So Distant Shame

During Ghost Month, the boundary between the living and the dead is supposed to thin. The gates of hell open up. The ghosts get hungrier. Or so says Gracie’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), who delivers this unsettling tidbit with the weary authority of someone who’s seen some things. For Gracie’s family, this bit of folklore hits particularly hard. Her father has just died, and the family has retreated to the sleepy countryside town of Rock Springs to regroup, grieve, and move forward. No such luck.

Gracie’s mom Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), a professional cellist who is barely keeping it together, tries to maintain normalcy while settling into a clearly haunted new setting. Gracie, meanwhile, does the one thing no child in a horror film should ever do: she buys a deeply cursed-looking doll at a yard sale. We’re left to wonder if this doll is going to go full Annabelle, though it’s soon overshadowed by bigger, more persistent hauntings. Mom starts seeing visions of her dead husband. Maybe his presence is a bit tender. But nevertheless terrifying. Whether he’s a mournful ghost, a protective spirit, or a harbinger of something more malevolent is left to question

Just as we’re settling into the rhythms of a contained supernatural drama, Rock Springs cracks open into something much broader. A shift in time and tone takes us to a 19th-century Chinese labor camp, where Benedict Wong plays a worker watching his friends and family slaughtered by white Americans who want them erased. It’s unexpected, the kind of cinematic swerve that makes you sit up and recalibrate your expectations. This 20-minute sequence is far and away the film’s strongest, with a noticeable surge in scope, focus, and emotional clarity. Drawn from real historical atrocities, it’s a horror that lingers beyond the screen, one that haunts the town and the woods around it.

Writer-director Vera Miao is reaching for something bigger than a ghost story. She’s exploring the legacy of anti-Chinese racism and how violence echoes across generations, filtered through spiritual beliefs about death, memory, and unfinished business. Her ideas are compelling, and the structure, jumping between timelines, genres, and even dreamscapes, is ambitious. It mostly works. The thematic threads are there. The connective tissue just isn’t always strong enough to hold them fully together.

Rather than creating a cleanly layered narrative, the film sometimes feels loosely stitched, with moments that drift slightly out of sync. The historical flashbacks, the haunted house, Gracie’s dreamworld — they don’t quite harmonize into one whole. It’s not confusing so much as just overstuffed and overreaching.

That said, when Rock Springs hits, it hits hard. The horror imagery is delightfully grotesque. Practical effects bring to life creatures made from human bodies mangled and smooshed together like Play-Doh. They are tactile, gloppy, and horrifying in a satisfyingly analog way. These monsters don’t just pop out for jump scares; they stick in your brain like folk art from hell.

Kelly Marie Tran is solid in a role that asks her to do a lot with relatively little. Her performance carries the emotional weight, even if the character sometimes feels like more of a narrative vessel than a fully developed person. Benedict Wong, despite limited screen time, leaves a much deeper impression. His section of the film has a moral and historical gravity that anchors the rest of the story.

Rock Springs is ultimately an audacious debut. Not everything lands, and some elements feel more fully realized than others, but the film never coasts. It swings for something personal and haunted and culturally resonant. It may not all be perfect, but it’s far from disposable.

CONCLUSION: ‘Rock Springs’ is an audacious debut of a horror movie from Vera Miao, thematically rich and complete with goopy practical effects even if not every element soars equally high.