FrightFest review – The Serpent’s Skin (2025)
Alice Miao Mackay has directed six features since 2021 – all combining her interest in scruffy direct-to-video era genre material with her lived experience as an Australian trans woman in an era when her particular tribe is under all kinds of attack. Frankly, it’s a wonder her work is so genial and generous, even though her trans heroines repeatedly discover hidden abilities which empower them to fight back against oppressors. She doesn’t present queer sub-culture as utopian either, and is often hilarious in dissecting the clashes of fashion, personality, sexuality and taste among mixed groups of young fringe folk.
Anna (Alexandra McVicker) leaves her parents arguing about her transition and joins her sister Dakota (Charlotte Chimes) in the big city – she hooks up with idol-look guy Danny (Jordan Dulieu) before she meets soulmate Gen (Avalon Fast), a tattooist who recognises that she has mutant psychic powers. When activated, these powers involve glowing eyes, brain-pops, Jedi mind tricks, levitation and the like – the women look like poster images from those psychic knock-off films of the 1970s, Jennifer or Tourist Trap or Ruby. Gen gives Danny an ourobouros neck tattoo, which turns demonic and the glam guy becomes a soul-sucking stalker with vampire fangs who the heroines have to a) defeat and b) save from his dark self. With every film, Mackay has become a more assured director – or maybe has been able to call in more favours, work with more professional people or up the budget a bit (it’s obviously still tiny) in order to put on screen what she’s always been thinking of.
The Serpent’s Skin feels a little like the first issue of a comic (or like M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable): it introduces characters, powers and a world and provides a big bad to be bested, but leaves a lot of material lying about as if it could be developed later in a mix of city soap, superheroics, demon horror and social issues.
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