‘The Only Ones’ Slashes into Familiarity [Panic Fest 2025 Review]
Terrifier has had a profound impact on the horror scene, especially the indie horror scene. Love or hate Art the Clown, there’s no denying his and Damien Leone’s unprecedented success. What was born as a $35,000 showcase for extreme gore has now become the most successful unrated horror series of all time, a franchise whose third entry grossed a staggering $90 million. Filmmakers followed suit, with titles like In a Violent Nature and the entire Twisted Childhood Universe (including last year’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2) looking to springboard subversive slasher violence into big box office receipts. Expect a lot of that kind of filmmaking for the foreseeable future, and consider Jordan Miller’s The Only Ones among them.
The intro is Eli Roth’s Cabin-Fever-bowling-alley-anecdote-coded. A beefy lore dump with grindhouse visuals exposits the story of a family driven mad in the woods before their misshapen child is abandoned, later adopted by a witch who raises him into the haunt Dollface. Lots of practical blood and gore spills as Dollface rampages, but it’s all just a story, one shared among a group of friends in a van bound toward those same woods for a weekend away.
From there, The Only Ones doesn’t really start slashing again until the final few reels. Miller is more concerned with his troupe of actors and their many (many) personal traumas and misgivings. There’s some resonance there, especially between a queer couple and one’s reluctance to say, “I love you” back. But it’s all very movie-of-the-week-coded in a way that will undoubtedly turn some horror audiences off.
Early threads in the vein of The Evictors do introduce some conflict, namely in the form of a couple found staying over in the house, brusquely evicted to make way for the friends, but there’s a lot of build. A lot. At times, audiences might question whether Panic Fest was the right forum for The Only Ones’ premiere. It is a horror movie, though a consciously patient one. A wannabe documentary filmmaker among the group remarks, “Sometimes making a movie is scarier than the movie itself,” and at times, that’s an apt description for The Only Ones. There’s promise in the opening bloodshed and the possibility of a weekend erupting into violence among close friends. But the tease takes too long to pay off, and when it does, it’s never exactly clear why.
When the deaths do arrive, they’re a sight to behold. One particular killing involving a handheld camcorder will no doubt rank among the best of the year, though it feels too little, too late. The interstices of the interpersonal conflict are too ill-defined to render the double-crosses and regressions into madness meaningful. While our final girl is refreshing, her arc is ludicrously finalized with an ending that veers too far into parody, even if the final line does land.
The Only Ones is a promising, though uneven, slasher. Bouts of extreme violence no doubt endeavor to capture the Terrifier zest, though misguided conflict and heavy characterization—usually a boon—derail what tension there is long before The Only Ones finally delivers on its premise. As a streaming treat, The Only Ones might capture some attention as a new movie for a late Saturday night. Otherwise, The Only Ones isn’t the only indie slasher trying to ingratiate itself into the zeitgeist, and there are others doing so more successfully than this.
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The Only Ones
Summary
The Only Ones is a laudable yet uneven slasher that fails to distinguish itself from the horror pack.
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