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(Popcorn Frights Review) THE ONLY ONES is a Bloody, Twisty Indie Film that Knows its Slasher Roots

By. Professor Horror

                                                                              

 

Playing at this year’s Popcorn Frights Film Festival, THE ONLY ONES takes the familiar “friends in the woods” setup and twists it into a tense, blood-splattered tale of paranoia, mistrust, and unintended carnage. Writer-director Jordan Miller leans into classic slasher and cabin-in-the-woods tropes (ex: isolated setting, missing friend, ominous strangers) only to flip them in unexpected ways, revealing that the real danger may come from within the group. Or does it?  While there are moments of sly humor and self-awareness, the film keeps one foot planted in grounded human drama as it uses dark comedy to heighten rather than undermine the tension. What follows is part slasher, part study in how fear, suspicion, and a few bad decisions can spiral into a full-blown body count, leaving the survivors (and the audience) wondering how things went so wrong so fast. THE ONLY ONES is a smart, scrappy indie slasher that knows its tropes, isn’t afraid to twist them, and delivers some gnarly kills along the way. It might linger too long in backstory and never fully unleash the chaos its premise promises, but when it’s firing, it’s bloody good fun.

                          

At first glance, THE ONLY ONES looks like it’s headed straight for the “cabin in the woods” cliché graveyard: six friends, remote property, no cell service, and a creepy prologue about a killer named Boneface. The opening even leans hard into slasher tropes enough that you almost wish the fakeout was the real movie. But then Jordan Miller’s narrative flips the script. Instead of a masked maniac, most of the bloody chaos comes from a deadly cocktail of paranoia, misunderstanding, and bad decisions. In other words, THE ONLY ONES takes the genre’s bones and rearranges them into something that feels both familiar and fresh. It’s not a full-tilt comedy like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, but there’s a shared DNA in the way coincidences and mistakes snowball into murder. Miller is clearly in on the joke, sprinkling in darkly funny beats (a rolling wagon here, a tone-deaf character moment there) while still playing it straighter than its more absurd cousin. This middle-ground approach means you get bursts of irony and meta-humor without tipping into spoof territory, though it also means the film never quite hits the outrageous heights it hints at.

Where the movie takes its biggest swing is in the group dynamic. Nicky (Paul Cottman) has inherited his late uncle’s sprawling rural home, and his friends are there to help him settle in. The crew is an eclectic mix: a podcaster obsessed with haunted history, a would-be documentarian, a lesbian couple (Emily Classen and Tatiana Nya Ford, whose natural chemistry is one of the film’s bright spots), a trigger-happy buddy, and a few others with secrets of their own. An awkward encounter with two squatters sets the stage for mistrust, and when one friend goes missing after a psychedelic wander in the woods, suspicion starts eating the group alive. The best stretch of THE ONLY ONES comes when the surviving friends are holed up in the house, convinced there’s a killer outside. It’s a delicious reversal of the standard siege setup, made all the more tense because these people are capable of turning on each other without any external threat.

                                     

That said, the film occasionally gets bogged down in backstory. Some exposition dumps slow the pacing, and while the extra character detail is nice in theory, not every monologue earns the runtime it eats up. Performance-wise, this is a mixed bag. Some cast members (particularly Classen and Ford) bring nuance and lived-in authenticity, while others are a little too stiff or one-note. The character work doesn’t derail the story, but stronger energy across the board would have helped the tonal juggling act between horror and humor land more consistently.

On the gore front, THE ONLY ONES punches above its budget. The kills may not reinvent the slasher wheel, but they’re executed with solid practical effects, plenty of blood, and a few creative flourishes that keep things lively. There’s nothing here that will make hardened gorehounds drop their jaws, but the commitment to physical effects over cheap CGI is refreshing and the editing sells the violence without lingering so long that it tips into self-parody.  Visually, Miller makes good use of contrast. The house is almost too clean and modern for a “cabin in the woods” setting, which adds a subtle unease to the early scenes. Once things turn violent, the brightness and airiness of the space works against the characters as it strips away the safety net of shadows and darkness. The film also sprinkles in just enough nods to horror history (Nancy Anne Ridder from Scream pops up for a quick cameo) to make genre fans feel at home without leaning on nostalgia as a crutch.

                                          

If there’s one thing THE ONLY ONES nails, it’s respecting the slasher formula while still subverting it. Like Scream before it, it understands that you can play with the rules, poke fun at them, even flip them entirely, but you can’t act like you’re above them. The structure is all here: a group of friends, an isolated location, escalating deaths, suspicion tearing the survivors apart. But the truth of what is happening is a clever conceit that taps into human fallibility rather than supernatural inevitability. There are moments when the setup begs for sharper comedic timing or bigger ironic payoffs, and instead the film stays in low gear. You can see the potential for a truly unhinged horror-comedy masterpiece lurking under the surface, but what we get is a fun, blood-spattered indie that plays it a little safer than it could. Still, originality points are in order. In a sea of formulaic slashers, THE ONLY ONES has a new idea and the guts to run with it. It may not go as hard as its influences, but it carves out its own space with enough personality, paranoia, and practical gore to keep you hooked. It’s the kind of movie that works best at a festival screening or late at night with friends, when you can appreciate both the tension and the sly genre winks. So, keep an eye out for it at festivals and maybe think twice before you assume the killer’s outside.