‘Starry Eyes’ On Netflix Is A Smart, Sexy, Must-See Scary Movie

New on Netflix is Starry Eyes, a subtly brilliant, bonafide scary tale of demonic possession and the deadly price of stardom. Since its April 3rd release on the platform, the film has ranked within the top spots of Netflix’s most-watched titles and is slowly but surely creating some buzz. Starry Eyes is a horror film quite obviously made by horror fans who blend elements of classic possession tropes with the real-life terror of almost certain failure in a soulless industry.

Contains (very) mild spoilers

Sarah Walker (played perfectly by Alex Essoe) is an aspiring actress stuck in a dead-end waitressing job at Big Taters — a knock-off, less ironic Hooters without the chicken wings. When she’s not working, she’s running from audition to audition where she’s denied and denied some more. Between demeaning shifts and failed readings, she hangs out at her apartment complex pool with her roommate’s friends, around whom she’s clearly an outcast. When she finally calls it a night, Sarah is continuously haunted by her stagnancy: hundreds of black and white photos of Rita Hayworth, Ingrid Bergman, and Vivian Leigh, along with dozens of other classic Hollywood faces, line the walls and watch over her as she tries to forget about one aimless day only to wake up to another.

After a while, this ongoing frustration might make anyone pull their hair out — though Sarah actually does. Failing to acknowledge she’s stuck in a fixed industry, Sarah physically punishes herself for not being able to push through to the next level. So when she gets a callback from the fictional Astreus Pictures about a lead part in a horror film that will rebrand the elite household name, she agrees to do anything to keep the part, even after she discovers the demonic origins of Hollywood’s most powerful players.

Starry Eyes is unique from your run-of-the-mill tale of possession because Sarah is given a choice: she can continue her hamster-wheel lifestyle or she can literally sell herself to the devil to finally achieve her dream. Sarah initially breaks down after learning she’ll have to have sex with a producer nearly fifty years her senior to guarantee the top-billing spot (and her being a vessel for Astreus), but she decides to go through with it because anything is better than life as she knows it — serving tater tots to chauvinist pigs after soul-crushing auditions. While at first it’s easy to judge (her roommate Tracy is shocked that “people even do that anymore”), Sarah’s offering of herself marks the first time she’s been invited rather than rejected into a world so starkly different from her own — and after so many failures, acceptance feels pretty life-changing.

Writing-directing duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer have created a smart, old school psychological horror tale that offers varying perspectives on what it means to come of age, to be a self-made woman, to chase a dream in a brutal industry, and to give up everything on the way to the top. Kolsch and Widmyer offer a David Cronenberg-like outlook on Hollywood, making the City of Angels look and feel like a hollow wasteland of dreams gone by. The duo also draws upon direction that cleverly pays homage to ’80s horror and mixes it with Lynchian imagery (think Ti West’s The House of the Devil meets the bare bones of Lost Highway) to slowly draw out smart scares that won’t make you jump but will certainly have you shivering later.

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Photos: Netflix