For at least an hour, Push is one of the best, most nail-biting movies of 2025. It’s a masterful work of horror-thriller craftsmanship, brought to eerie life by writer-director tandem David Charbonier and Justin Powell (The Boy Behind the Door) and streaming on Shudder. The cinematography is stylish, the dread is unrelenting, and the plot is mysterious and ambiguous. Somebody should have told Alicia Sanz, since she doesn’t seem to wake up until close to the end.
Nobody seems to think this but me, so take it with a grain of salt. But in a rare inversion of the usual trend, a brilliantly crafted movie is let down by a disinterested lead performance instead of the other way around. And ironically, when the premise is blown too wide and the thrills become more obvious and less creative in the final third, Sanz comes into her own. You can’t win.
But let me explain. Push – originally titled Open House, a far too similar title to the thoroughly mediocre 2018 Netflix thriller – is about Natalie (Sanz), a realtor with the seemingly impossible task of selling a sprawling estate with a grim history. Like all Final Girls – though I’m not sure the term necessarily applies, since she’s also the Only Girl – Natalie has her fair share of baggage. Her boyfriend died recently in a nasty car wreck, and she’s heavily pregnant with his child. You can barely tell, though, because like all pregnant movie protagonists, she’s immune to water retention, swollen ankles, and all the other unglamorous accoutrements of childbearing. If it wasn’t for the bump, you’d never know.
For a while, I hated Push because there’s a really long sequence in which Natalie arrives at the expansive property looking radiant in a lovely white dress, and deliberately poses like a cover model in front of all the windows, gently cradling her stomach as the sun dapples the scene. That’s far too obvious for me. But it serves the additional purpose of making us cursorily familiar with the house’s geography, which is just as well. Pretty soon, a mysterious stranger credited only as “The Client” (Raúl Castillo, Army of the Dead, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Night Teeth) arrives and begins to pursue Natalie through the property. In a stroke of bad luck, she goes into labour almost immediately after he arrives, meaning that she’s forced to navigate a deadly cat-and-mouse game through the house’s complex layout while putting up with contractions.
From here, Push gets really, really good. The dread is constant, emphasised both by Natalie’s predicament and The Client’s determined Michael Myers-style stroll. The specific features of the house are used in endlessly creative and suspenseful ways, and Charbonier and Powell skilfully blend the typical flourishes of haunted-house horror with the white-knuckle tension of a home-invasion thriller. It all works perfectly. Correction: It almost all works perfectly.
Through all this, I never stopped being distracted by Sanz’s performance. Natalie is utterly nonplussed in moments that should cause her pretty significant concern, like all the house’s lights going out, and it takes her ages to feel appropriately worried about the really obvious danger she’s in. Even then, the sheer terror of the situation never quite comes through. She’s consistently able to rally herself in key moments that don’t feel born of desperation but contrivance, and she occasionally sleepwalks into obligatorily silly decisions.
A still from Push | Image via Shudder
As it turns out, the pitch of this performance works best when there’s an element of mania to it, but this only comes through in the closing half-hour when the action leaves the house and the tables slightly turn, hunted becoming demented hunter. But the movie’s at its weakest here, abandoning its clever filmmaking tricks and rich sense of place for more straightforward, albeit nasty thrills. The last-minute introduction of ideas that shift the genre slightly makes little difference, since they’re arriving too late and get no clarity.
Push has plenty of clear influences, and it wears them all on its sleeve. Inside is the most obvious one, but there’s a strong strain of A Quiet Place to be found in certain key sequences too. The Client’s whole deal is very Halloween-esque, there’s a shrugging just-because quality to the violence that evokes Strangers, and there’s even an unexpected nod to Die Hard (you’ll know it when you see it). But the movie never feels derivative, or at least the parts of it set inside the house don’t. For all the complaining I’ve done here, it cannot be understated how well those set-pieces work.
It’s just a shame that such a lean, mean thriller ends up falling apart a little by the end, grappling with concepts it isn’t sure about. I might not have been keen on the leads – Castillo is okay, but he’s playing a cipher rather than an actual character, so I didn’t love him in this either – but that seems to be specific to me, so I’d be cautious about not recommending the movie on that basis alone. But the third act is uncontroversially weaker than the first two, and a post-credits stinger leaves a confusingly sour taste.
Do watch it, though. If nothing else, the kind of raw filmmaking prowess that is sometimes displayed here is well worth the price of admission, and for two-thirds of its runtime, it’s really good. That’s a lot more than most movies can claim.
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