‘Corpus’ review: Hedonistic horror debut plays out against the sweaty club scene of overdue ’90s New York | Reviews

Dir. Corrin Evans. USA. 2026. 102mins

An aspiring photographer and sometime drug dealer, Sayo (Jeff Wahlberg) is a fixture in the sweaty, hedonistic club scene of overdue ’90s NYC. But even the excesses of Manhattan party culture can’t prepare him for what lies in wait when he accompanies his semi-requited crush, rising star actor Vince (Brodie Townsend), and their mutual buddy Ross (Michael Vlamis), to a weekend party in a decrepit villa in upstate New York. It’s fair to say that the three mysterious women who inhabit the mansion want the boys for their bodies. Just not in the way that the friends expected, in this sticky, sexy horror by debut director Corrin Evans.

This is a vibes-led rather than plot-led viewing experience

Evans, who co-wrote and co-produced the film with Roswell actress Lily Cowles (who also appears in the film as Billy, the ringleader of the three women), previously worked in the film industry as an intimacy co-ordinator. It’s a background that stands her in good stead in a picture that trades heavily on the heady erotic tension between the characters. This is a vibes-led rather than plot-led viewing experience. The story, which shares gloopy DNA with Brian Yuzna’s Society and Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, is less fully realised than the film’s vividly evoked mood of transgressive sensuality. Nevertheless, the picture, which premieres in Fantasia’s Cheval Noir competition, introduces Evans as a promising fresh voice in genre cinema

The film opens with a genuinely unsettling prologue. A juvenile, inexperienced model, Wren (Nuha Jes Izman) is eager to please Billy, the star photographer whose voice is heard off screen and through whose lens we see the uncertainty creep into the eyes of the younger woman. Wren is undeniably pretty, but her innocence and purity, Billy suggests, is a handicap to her career. “It’s important to show you can be edgy,” Billy purrs, as she beckons to a paunchy, naked male figure wearing what looks like a cross between a Medieval plague mask and a failed experiment in basket weaving. The scene cuts before we learn what fate awaits Wren. Suffice to say, when we next meet her – feral, wild-haired and covered with the blood of a chicken she has just slaughtered, ostentatiously, with her own hands – she is a very different woman.

The story then winds forward by a year. Deft editing and the device of Sayo’s camera and flash captures a thrillingly dissolute snapshot of the NYC club scene. This is the era just before cameraphones so Sayo is able to catch the club punters consumed in a kind of unselfconscious abandon that no longer exists in quite the same way. Each shutter click slows down time, drenching the frame in acid yellow and smouldering orange.

It’s a neat technique and a tantalising means of introducing Vince into the film – feline and predatory, he stalks across the dancefloor, his eyes locked on Sayo’s camera lens. Vince is fully aware of the power he has and he uses it as both a toy and a weapon. Sayo has been burned a few too many times to accept his former friend and occasional lover’s invitation to a party at Billy’s isolated out-of-town pad without a few questions. But ultimately, he can’t resist Vince’s mercurial and magnetic charm.

The boys expect a thronging house party. What they get is faded, peeling grandeur (the production design goes all out on creepy marble statues and elegant decay), three strange women (along with Billy and Wren, there is Cata, played by Ching Valdes-Aran) and an uncomfortably charged atmosphere. The score borrows something of the cold-blooded pulse of Mica Levi’s Under The Skin soundtrack, a musical reference which gives a subtle hint as to what to expect once the drugs, the booze and the pagan folk songs start flowing.

This is not a film that will satisfy audiences that require their plot ends to be neatly tied and their character motivations to be clear – the film’s slippery screenplay leaves us with plenty of questions about the nature of the fate that entangles the six characters. But what’s certain is that nobody will escape unchanged by the experience.