By Cullen Wade

When it comes to the year’s iconic headlines, the big ’25 peaked early. On January 16^th, the Guardian published a piece by Rebecca Shaw, graced with a headline that distilled how we all felt as we closed out the first quarter of the 21^st century: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down—I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” Six months later, the cinematic equivalent of that headline was released, a horror-comedy that captures the absurd anxiety of living at the mercy of people who are as pathetic as they are cruel. And of course, it’s a Tubi original.

Jackie (Camila Banus) and Jason (Tahj Mowry), a 30-something couple, buy their first home together on an idyllic suburban street. On move-in day, they meet Alec (Jonah Hwang), the teenage grandson of the home’s deceased owner, who eagerly welcomes them to the house and the neighborhood. He’s intrusive, though basically harmless at first, but as Jackie and Jason start to make the home their own, it becomes clear that poor boundaries are the least of Alec’s problems.

Those are the broad strokes of the story, but no synopsis can convey the experience of watching Get Off My Lawn. Director Amara Cash and DP Josh Maas shoot the film in garish, hyper-saturated colors that mock its own positioning as commercial entertainment—somewhere between Tim Burton’s suburbia and an Old Navy ad. Cash and her cast maintain a unique tone: rather than swinging between sickly paranoia and sitcom humor, Get Off My Lawn manages to cram ten pounds of both into each scene’s five-pound bag, to the detriment of neither.

This tonal eccentricity lets the actors cut loose, and Hwang gives what by rights should be a star-making turn in the part of the psychotic Alec. Get Off My Lawn is part of the recent decade’s run of films that correctly identify entitled white (-passing) boys as the most dangerous creatures on the planet. When it comes to Alec (the “Gen Z Leave it to Beaver,” as Jason calls him), seldom has milquetoast been so terrifying. His simpering politesse (what my wife Emma calls “Chic-Fil-A nice”) is a smiley-face sticker on a bullet casing. Propelled by this aw-shucks scourge, obsessed with upholding traditional values of an imagined past, the film plows its gas-powered mower through the most overgrown parts of our shared backyard.

The trouble starts in cyberspace, as a pranking campaign against Jackie and Jason by Alec and his friends Ethan (Tyler Lofton) and Ray (Kayla Maisonet), ostensibly for internet clout. Alec declares his disdain for social media culture, but recognizes its utility for laundering real-world violence. Ethan and Ray get into it for the lulz, unaware of how dead serious the person directing them is.

On the other side of the divide from Alec’s royal flush of privilege is our central couple. As a non-white pair of first-time homebuyers (Black and Hispanic applicants are almost twice as likely to get denied home loans as white borrowers of comparable means), Jackie and Jason are particularly vulnerable to Alec’s mistreatment. Get Off My Lawn joins the long tradition of horror films about buying a house you can’t afford. Jackie and Jason are victims of a hot seller’s market, having submitted a lowball offer but agreed to forgo inspection and take the house as-is. Despite having not yet closed the deal, Alec’s parents allow them to move in anyway. This position makes them reluctant to take action against the homeowner’s son, lest they back out before the sale legally goes through.

The film is explicitly concerned with generation gaps, as when Ethan calls Jason a boomer, to which he retorts, “I’m a millennial, little boy!” The last few years have been lousy with journalism, both thinkpieces and straight reporting, about falling birthrates among millennials. Childlessness even became a talking point in the last U.S. presidential race, albeit, like everything else about that election cycle, a stupid one. (Get Off My Lawn is far from the only 2025 horror film to countenance millennial childlessness, nor is this the last time I’ll write about it this year—but don’t let me get ahead of myself.)

The aforementioned discourse has covered the economic and cultural reasons behind the trend, but speaking as a millennial myself, there’s one that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s when we look at the generations after us, the ones who have never known a political landscape not dominated by Trumpism and have internalized its “loudest liar wins” doctrine, and think… what if my kid’s an asshole? And even worse, what if it’s my fault? That’s the sick joke Get Off My Lawn ends on, the cruel reality that well-meaning elders can—and to some degree invariably do—fall face-first into the same pile of dog shit they forgot to pick up.

As of this writing, Get Off My Lawn has fewer than 600 views on Letterboxd. I hope I can use what small platform I have to urge you to watch this film. There are relatable horror movies, and then there are horror movies where people of color are terrorized by petty bourgeois young men with preppy haircuts and a twisted notion of tradition, who use the plausible deniability of internet humor to normalize escalating violence and are insulated from consequences by being related to landlords who hold all the cards in a precarious, exploitative housing arrangement over a childless millennial couple whose narrow escape from this nightmare makes them doubtful about bringing kids into this fucked-up world. Nope, not relatable at all.

P.S. Look, 900 words, and I didn’t mention racist police violence or the fact that the climax happens by the swimming pool. I have range after all!

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