Leighton Trent’s review published on Letterboxd:
”You’re just a man in a Halloween mask. What are you gonna do now?”
The Man. The Myth. The Legend… ENDS 🤔
David Gordon Green has got some kind of hutzpah. Some kind of brazen hutzpah balls to end the story of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers this way. He knew it would not only be divisive, but he knew the loyalists would not just hate the film but hate him in the process. And he did it anyway.
The concluding chapter of this trilogy has had me thinking a great deal about Halloween III: Season of the Witch, not just in the similarities in which Green fashioned this trilogy after the original series in its title credits design, but how each film mirrors the tone of the original three, with this one mirroring the darker themes and interesting character work Witch is known for.
But, the built in [Michael Myers] fan base was not in place then like it is now. That is the difference between the two. Halloween III has had its re-evaluation and is now appreciated in its own right for what it was trying to accomplish by branching out past Myers' lumbering, knife-wielding dark shadow. The film scoped out the idea of a mask and how death lurks around the corner just by putting it on. Ends seeks to do the same here, more in tone than style though. We see so little of “The Shape”, so little of Haddonfield’s “Boogeyman” here until the film’s conclusion, but his influence is there. The idea of evil, an “infection” as Laurie states, is ever-present and finds a way to infect someone else who seems destined toward violence, toward death, toward Evil, as it were. The mask is Corey’s reason for existence just as much as it Michael’s. It is just a different mask.
Alright, I will be the first to admit that I’m a huge sucker for a big swing, for a big risk in storytelling and/or execution. The bigger, the weirder, the messier, the better. So, I was in hook, line and sinker here once I realized where this was actually headed. Where 2018’s Halloween feels just right and it’s sequel feels almost like a howler of an insult in the way Resurrection is, this one falls squarely in the middle of just throwing what it can against the wall and hoping it’ll stick. For now, it sticks for me - the film won me over simply by not being what I expected it to be or how I thought it might end. As with any and all films, this is always subject to change based on a re-watch, but I’ll take this ending in the here and now. In the end, I think time will be kind to it just the way it has been to the original third film it has sought to model itself after.
But, we can all agree on one thing: Halloween doesn't end here. Michael doesn't end here. The Shape will take a new form because this evil will never die no matter how many times it's been killed. Laurie's story may be over, but with Michael, we'll always get to spend Halloween with him.
