Becoming (2020)

Becoming earns its chills the old-fashioned way: by turning intimacy into a battleground, where the scariest thing isn’t a monster in the dark but the slow, uncanny feeling that the person beside you is slipping away. Omar Naim keeps the dread simmering, letting tiny details—an off rhythm in speech, a wrongness in posture—snowball into a tight, nerve-wracking ride anchored by Toby Kebbell’s unnervingly committed performance and Penelope Mitchell’s grounded, aching resolve. The film’s road-trip backdrop gives it a restless, American-nightmare vibe, and Jason Patric adds a weary, lived-in edge that deepens the sense of an ancient evil with a long memory. If you prefer your horror loud and splashy, this may feel more patient than punchy, but for anyone who loves psychological terror with a sci-fi tinge and a steadily tightening grip, it’s a smart, unsettling watch.

Becoming is clearly aiming for a slow-burn, relationship-first body-horror thriller where the real terror is watching someone you love slip away piece by piece. The problem is that the pacing can feel sluggish and repetitive, with long stretches of moody tension that don’t always pay off in satisfying scares or a sharp mythology. It leans more on atmosphere and performance than clever plotting, so if you want tight rules, big twists, or relentless horror set pieces, you may end up checking your watch. Still, Toby Kebbell commits hard to the unsettling transformation and the film has a grim, road-trip dread that might work for viewers who like intimate, downbeat supernatural dramas over crowd-pleasing horror.