Return Visit
The Thing
“They aren’t labeled, chum.”Written to be infinitely rewatchable. Every time I put this on, I realize I don't actually know where it's heading. I recall key beats, the famous scenes, but not who dies, how they die, or the order in which they die. There are a number of films where I've stated that I wished I could see them for the first time again; this film manages that with every viewing.This is achieved through the ambiguity of the mystery at the core of it, one that seems to change shape in my memory and then gets course-corrected the next time I watch it. For example, the blood bags scene wouldn't hang together if not for the fact that solving the mystery matters far less than the tension created by the near-impossible scenario. It's a feature of the storytelling, not a bug.Adding to the ambiguity is a relatively large cast of characters, given the setting. The beauty of having so many characters, many with similar characteristics, is that it makes it difficult to recall who to latch on to as things spin out of control. This time in particular I noticed how many characters would simply be missing during key scenes, like when Windows has the shotgun wrestled away from him.During the cell simulation sequence, I noted that the intruder cell is depicted as red and the dog cell as blue. In most movies with similar simulations, as cells become infected they'd turn into the color of the intruding cell, but here the resulting host cell is indistinguishable from the dog cell: blue. In this film, it isn't as simple as blue being good and red being bad. It's ambiguous.
May 6, 2026 · Rewatched
