Brooklyn Horror 2026 Review: POSTHUMOUS, Tapes from the Darkside

Throughout the years, such films as Wolf Creek, The Babadook, The Loved Ones, Lake Mungo, Talk to Me, and many others collectively contributed to turning the audience into a proverbial Pavlov’s dog: A new Australian horror movie is always a reason to get immediately excited.

This year, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival features two such films in the program. One is the festival’s Closing Night Film, Kick On, which has already received its share of much-deserved praise since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival. The other one is Posthumous, Josh Tanner's debut feature, which also helps to uphold the reputation of Australian horror canon.

Zoe (Sophie Lowe) comes back to her childhood home in hopes of dealing with some personal stuff. This journey is stalled by Zoe’s strained relationship with her burly father (David Roberts), unresolved problems with her boyfriend Alex (Remy Hii – it’s nice to see that Brad from Spider-Man: Far from Home is doing well!), and the ever-open wound of never knowing her mother, who died in childbirth.

Zoe starts rewatching the tape that her mom (Kira-Che Heelan), knowing that she was terminally ill during her pregnancy, recorded for her, which contains messages for every Zoe’s birthday up until her thirtieth, which is now fast approaching. As Zoe obsessively watches the tapes, she also finds some old photos of her parents and meets their reclusive neighbor, Brenda (Doris Younane), who looks like someone who might be very much into the occult stuff and acts cryptically enough for Zoe to want to dig even deeper into whatever happened in the past.

Posthumous is yet another ambitious debut, this one boldly mixing supernatural with psychological horror about familiar traumas, and Lovecraftian imagery with an unexpected dose of sci-fi. Despite this being his first feature, Josh Tanner is no stranger to the inner workings of the genre, having directed multiple horror shorts, such as Wandering Soul and Reverse. What he always excelled at in those films, and what translates quite well into the feature form, is the ability to extract the sense of eeriness and dread out of seemingly thin air and often seemingly common experiences.

Here, Tanner takes full advantage of what the plot already makes central – the analogue aesthetic of VHS tapes, which by now should probably be officially recognized as the Devil’s invention. With all the glitches, tracking noise, and the blinking lights, it creates a sense of constant dark presence, an almost cosmic horror created out of seemingly nothing.

The authors of Posthumous seem to understand that the power of films that play around with grainy, diluted analogue imagery isn’t all that much about what we see, but about what we can’t, making the audience squint and gaze intently at every nook and cranny on the screen. That said, the parts we do get to see towards the end are pretty impressive too.

The film’s most ostensible flaw is that it’s a bit longer than it needs to be. It’s not even a matter of pacing and some narrative repetition. In fact, that actually works quite well for the story, emphasizing that self-destructive behavior stemming from an unresolved trauma is usually a vicious circle of repeating the same actions again and again. There is an issue of the running time surpassing the amount of story the authors are telling here, but this is such a common weakness of many debut features that it barely registers as one.

What also helps carry the narrative through almost two hours of screen time is the emotional relatability of it. At its core and underneath all the background noise and macabre designs, Posthumous is a film about a fractured identity and the ingrained need to reconstruct it. As the story rarely ventures outside Zoe’s house, we can also find ourselves trapped there with her – stuck between the past and the present in hopes of finally reconciling them, only to realize that, for better or worse, the two are pretty much inseparable to begin with.

The film screened at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.