OKLAHOMA CITY – The spring is a time for color, right? It’s a time for joy and freedom and ecstatic celebration as the earth comes back to life and brings flowers and beauty and all things nice.
Well, not for everyone.
For some, the springtime is just another time for thrills, scares, and the unnerving discomfort of a thunderstorm.
If that sounds like your kinda thing, then you’ll be spoiled for choice in OKC theaters this season.
There’s a brooding, monochromatic vampire noir, a teeth-bearing, skin-peeling monster reimagining, and a hyper-stylish, pitch-dark mind game from a modern master of tone and tension.
So leave your flowers at the door, because this spring is keeping things pretty dark.
‘Nadja’ – Oklahoma City Museum of Art – April 30th through May 1st
It’s a 90s-set inverted deconstruction of “Dracula” and it’s a late-night neo-noir of aimless loneliness and generational trauma.
It’s “Nadja,” from polarizing writer/director Michael Almereyda, recasting the well-worn drama of Dracula through the eyes of his 20th century daughter, exhausted, listless, and aching for release from her vampire immortality.
The titular Nadja wanders through NYC, connecting with her brother and enjoying some characteristically vampiric trysts on the side while attempting to retrieve the corpse of her father, who’s finally been killed by the legendary Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda going full-ham.)
If she can burn the body of Dracula to ash, then maybe she’ll be released from the hell that is eternal life. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all just an artsy exploration of Gen X irony and detachment.
Almereyda does it all in smoky, ponderous black-and-white, cranking up all the artful contrast, interspersed with moments filmed through a toy camera that renders the picture in garbled messes of pixels and abstraction.
And if all that isn’t enough to pique the interest of any cynical cinema freak, the master of mysterious movie oddity himself, David Lynch, adds his name and his gravitas as executive producer, and even has a cameo as a security guard.
It’s screening here in a meticulously restored and striking new 4K print, so if you’ve ever wanted to see just how clear and crisp those distorted Fisher-Price camera shots can be, here’s your chance.
For times, tickets, and more, visit okcmoa.com.
‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ – Now Playing
Casual or uninitiated viewers might wonder why some random guy named Lee Cronin has the audacity to put his name before the title of his new reimagining of the mummy mythos.
Actual horror fans that are familiar with his 2019 sleeper “The Hole in the Ground” or his bloody breakout “Evil Dead Rise” know he’s earned the right through his insistence on unforgiving horror and his refusal to pull any punches viscerally or emotionally.
His all-new spin on the often overwrought “Mummy” franchise completely unravels the usual tropes of the story, dumping the visage of a vengeful, slow-stumbling, cloth-wrapped ancient evil and replacing it with a mysteriously zombified young girl.
Cronin continues unwinding the parental/familial horror threads of his two previous outings by centering this “Mummy” on the parents of a long-disappeared daughter, who shockingly turns up eight years later partially mummified inside a sarcophagus.
And then, as you might expect, she starts attacking, biting, and generally wreaking supernatural havoc on all the preconceptions of parental protection and the thinning walls between life and death.
But of course, you can also expect some serious gore and grossness. This is the guy that made an “Evil Dead” movie, after all.
‘Mother Mary’ – Opens April 24th
Writer/director David Lowery has made quite an indie name for himself through a visionary, photographic eye and a penchant for thick, uncompromising tone, all on display in cerebral standouts like “A Ghost Story” and 2021’s “The Green Knight.”
Well, after a brief foray back into the world of live-action Disney remakes (his overlooked 2023 “Peter Pan & Wendy,” following his 2016 success “Pete’s Dragon,”) Lowery is once again jumping headlong into cryptically psychological, tonally dense original work with the convention-blurring “Mother Mary.”
Starring Anne Hathaway as a grimly dark, catholic-themed, generationally seismic pop superstar (like an alternate-reality Taylor Swift if she went full-on canonized cult-like and finally launched the religion she’s surely capable of commanding,) “Mother Mary” excavates the buried, charged emotionalism and fraught sexuality between the star and her former creative partner and costume designer.
Attempting to stage her long-anticipated resurgence tour, Hathaway’s Mother Mary comes crawling back to Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking costumer, her one-time friend, to devise the perfect stage attire. But the pair end up locked in a psychosexual mind game that might be the result of two mammoth creative egos or might be the manipulations of some unexplainable, unrelenting spirit pulling their strings.
Lowery presents it all in flowing fabrics and fraying sanity, soundtracked by electro-pop deconstructionists Charli XCX and FKA Twigs (with production from actual Swift-collaborator Jack Antonoff.)
It’s set to be a precariously odd and willfully dark psycho-musical, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen much since the weirdo subgenre’s late-70s heyday. Which is to say that it could be a wildly unique cult-classic in the making or a totally insane trainwreck. Either way, it should be interesting.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
