There are very few contemporary horror filmmakers whose names can conjure a physical reaction, but Darren Lynn Bousman is certainly one of them. His work has spanned from some of the best of the Saw franchise to cult favorites like Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Devil’s Carnival, to indie gems like St. Agatha. Bousman’s films often dare audiences to confront the limits of the human body and the ethical rot beneath institutional systems meant to protect it. But his latest, Twisted, represents something a bit stranger and more elusive. It’s a film that doesn’t just test pain thresholds, but destabilizes form itself.
Check out our full review of 'Twisted' - A Nasty Indie Horror That Lives Up to Its Name
The story follows an experienced con artist named Paloma (played by modern horror icon Lauren LaVera) who, along with her partner-in-crime Smith (played by Mia Healey), scams wealthy apartment owners and renters alike for a considerable profit. Paloma relishes in the deception and playing pretend, until one day she sets her sights on the wrong mark. Dr. Robert Kezian (played by the brilliant Djimon Hounsou) is a neurosurgeon on the brink of the mental edge, and when Paloma targets him, she ends up biting off far more than she can chew, and a deadly game of captor and captive begins.
Trying to pin Twisted down to a single genre almost feels beside the point. It’s a crime thriller, a mad scientist story, and a single-location pressure cooker (among others things) all in one. That idea of mashing up genres into a potent horror stew is not an accident. It’s the very thing that pulled Bousman toward the project. “Normally when you read a script, it’s one thing,” he told us in an exclusive interview. “It’s a horror film, it’s a thriller, it’s an action movie, whatever. I didn’t know what this movie was, and I was on page 70 of the script!”
Rather than resist that uncertainty, Bousman embraced it. Twisted became an experiment in tonal and formal escalation, one that allowed him to approach the film as three different genres colliding in real time. "That's why I wanted to make it, because it was so unique. It’s ping-ponging,” he says. “And I love that.”
That conceptual collision isn’t just present in the script, but embedded directly into the film’s visual language. As Twisted shifts modes, the movie itself begins to contort. “The aspect ratio changes every time the genre changes.” Bousman explained. “We change lenses based on what genre it is. As the movie goes on and becomes more horror, the aspect ratio closes in, everything is out of focus, and the colors become hyper stylistic.”
Most of those changes are purposefully incremental; almost imperceptible on a first watch. “It happens so gradually, scene by scene,” he says, crediting cinematographer Bella Gonzalez (Alien: Earth) for translating it into something tactile rather than distracting. “She did a great job of taking that idea and making it real.” The result is a film that quietly reprograms itself as it goes, rewarding close attention without ever announcing its own cleverness.
Anchoring that shifting structure is star Lauren LaVera, who continues to carve out a career in the genre space, but with a refusal to soften her characters or repeat herself and become boxed in by expectation. Known to many for her turn as Sienna Shaw in the infamous Terrifier series, LaVera saw Paloma as a deliberate pivot from the role most audiences associate her with.
The idea of getting to play around as a character who puts on multiple personas was, “So attractive” as LaVera described it. “I already had this bias that I knew I wanted to work with Darren, but you know, it all comes down to the script. And I fell in love with her.” LaVera said of her Twisted character. “I describe her as deliciously mischievous.”
That attraction went beyond novelty. After the runaway success of Terrifier 2 and 3, LaVera found herself inundated with offers that echoed the same emotional and physical beats. She turned most, if not all, of them down. “I'm very blessed to get offers that are very similar to Sienna. But I don’t want to become a stagnant artist,” she explains. “I want to be an artist that can explore versatility and explore different depths of human behavior and the human condition as a whole.”
Paloma offered exactly that, particularly in her moral ambiguity. A con artist by design, she slips between personas as easily as she slips between truths, and LaVera was adamant about not sanding down those edges. “I loved how morally gray Paloma came off. I don’t think it’s my job as an actor to make her likable,” she says. “If people find her likable, maybe it’s because they’re a little mischievous themselves.”
“I also really fell in love with her sense of humor. I thought her sense of humor really popped off of the page.” She points to screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, who previously worked on Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, as tonal reference points. “That movie is wickedly funny as well,” she recalls. “With Twisted, I really felt this attraction to Paloma’s sense of humor, and I wanted to keep that throughout.”
Discomfort has always been central to Bousman’s work, particularly when it comes to the human body. He has now returned once again to the cranium, and for many fans, that fixation inevitably recalls Saw III, whose infamous brain surgery sequence remains one of the franchise’s most indelible moments. “People always have a cringe factor when you're dealing with anything involving the skull or brain.” he says with a chuckle.
But Twisted reframes that fascination through a more explicitly philosophical lens. Bousman describes a lifelong obsession with esoteric and occult texts, many of which grapple with the unresolved mystery of consciousness. On set, he had both a neuroscientist and a neurotech on hand, who offered a revelation that reshaped the film’s thematic core: the idea that the essence of who we are may occupy a much smaller space than we’ve been led to believe.
“What we consider ourselves, that “who we are”, it's the size of a kidney bean.” Bousman explained. “If we were to take out a huge entire hemisphere of our brain, people can still function, they can still have a life. But there is one small section where if it's damaged, or if it's gone, you stop being you.” That concept feeds directly into Twisted’s ethical framework.
“I grew up thinking that it was like The Man with Two Brains, the Steve Martin thing, but it’s not.” the filmmaker continued. “We are close to these medical breakthroughs with the brain, and one of the things that Neal McDonough’s character says is that there is so much bureaucratic red tape to get anything done, because you have to pass human trials. But to get to human trials, you have to go through X, Y and Z. I thought it was an interesting question about, “Is it okay to break the law and have a body count if it meant saving millions of people in the long run?” That was something that fascinated me. So it was like taking that idea of what we did in the Saw films to the next level. I just love that idea.”
Twisted doesn’t pretend to answer that question cleanly. Instead, it tightens its grip - visually, tonally, and philosophically - until the audience is left to sit with the implications. And, of course, it takes everyone on a thrilling genre roller coaster at the same time. Like its genre-defying structure, this is a film that refuses stability, and in doing so, it reveals a filmmaker still probing the same obsessions that made his work resonate in the first place. Only now, with sharper tools and fewer safety nets.
‘Twisted’ will be available digitally beginning February 6th, 2026.
