Neve Campbell’s return as Sidney is a constant highlight of Scream 7. Campbell takes the comfort and confidence that comes with playing a character for 30 years and translates it into a performance that shifts believably from dead serious to tongue-in-cheek and back, often within the same scene but never in a way that rings false or tonally out of step with her circumstances. Sidney has to balance the normal anxieties of being parent to a teenager with how her bloody backstory is antagonizing her relationship with Tatum as news of the murders at Stu’s house reach them in Pine Grove. Even though much of how Scream 7 goes on to dig up the bones of the first movie winds up being to its detriment, Campbell’s performance as Sidney benefits from the constant resurfacing of the Woodsboro murders. It’s as if Kevin Williamson saw how hard David Gordon Green threw the “killing machine” lever in one direction for Laurie Strode in the recent Halloween sequels and said “I like it, but maybe 80% less.”
At 17, Tatum’s the same age Sidney was during the events of the first movie, which causes a ton of extra strife between the two once Ghostface comes a-calling again – that’s also what brings Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers back into the fold, who’s mostly here to act as a sounding board for Sidney. Sidney can’t quite calibrate how much of her bloody past to share with Tatum, who’s grown to resent Sidney for telling her story to the rest of the world through books and interviews, but never face-to-face to her. Isabel May is most at home in that tension in Tatum’s interactions with Sidney, doing a good job conveying the hurt associated with these feelings without straying into petulant territory. Petulant characters don’t do great in slashers most of the time.
But Tatum’s insecurity towards finding her place in the circle of life (and death) ends up translating into a character without much definition, something not helped by her being surrounded by trope-fuelled characters like “too-perfect boyfriend,” “popular blonde friend,” or my personal favorite, “weird kid.” Yes, Scream gets far more latitude than most other horror franchises when it comes to whipping these archetypes around like ill-fated marionettes, but Scream 7 rarely finds surprising ways to use them, especially when we’ve already seen characters like these subverted again and again in this series.
“
