Inspired by the 1885 massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyo. -- a racial pogrom that left at least 28 men dead and dozens more driven into the wilderness -- Vera Miao's debut feature, Rock Springs, arrives freighted with history.
The film, which premiered in the Midnight section at Sundance Film Festival, situates itself within the horror genre, yet it proceeds with the solemnity of an exhumation. What Miao appears to want is not simply to frighten but to reanimate: to conjure a buried atrocity and let its spectral residue seep into the present.
The film opens not in the 19th century but today, with three generations of Asian American women arriving in the titular town after a death in the family. Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), newly widowed and newly hired as a community-college instructor, has relocated with her young daughter, Gracie (Aria Kim), and her Mandarin-speaking mother-in-law (Fiona Fu).
Their house -- a cavernous Western structure framed by plains that seem to stretch into moral vacancy -- feels less like a home than an echo chamber. Grief here is not cathartic but suspended, diffused across long silences and blank glances.
Miao renders this opening movement in hushed tones. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's score hums and throbs at a low frequency, while David Marks's editing favors a glacial tempo that presses every gesture into a state of near-paralysis. Even Tran, an actress capable of tensile expressiveness, seems deliberately tamped down.
Emily's sorrow is interiorized to the point of abstraction; her daughter's muteness registers as both trauma and narrative device. When Gracie lifts a vaguely sinister doll at a yard sale -- an emblem that feels imported from more conventional horror fare -- the momentary flicker of childish delight is swiftly extinguished by a white girl's casual microaggressions. The encounter is less dramatically escalated than atmospherically absorbed; hostility here is ambient, another feature of the landscape.
The film's second section flashes back to the 1880s, where Chinese laborers, including Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong) and He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang), attempt to carve out communal stability in hostile terrain. Miao maintains her measured aesthetic but the historical chapter carries an urgency that the contemporary strand lacks. The miners shoot the breeze, and joke; their modest intimacies accrue weight precisely because catastrophe looms.
Given the film's Midnight section billing, the eruption of brutality feels like an inevitability rather than a surprise. When it arrives, it does so with grim fatalism. Notably, Miao implicates white women settlers alongside white men, suggesting that racial animus was not merely a masculine contagion but a civic one. Hatred is communal; so too is its aftermath.
In the final act, past and present collapse into one another. The family's haunting reveals itself to be not solely personal but historical -- the dead refusing the convenience of forgetting. Ritual practices that might initially read as folkloric ornamentation become instruments of reckoning. The film proposes that grief, when unmoored from its origins, metastasizes; only by acknowledging the sedimented violence beneath the floorboards can the living begin to breathe.
Miao deserves recognition for resurrecting a largely neglected episode of American racial terror. The Rock Springs massacre occupies no central pedestal in the national imagination; its victims have seldom been granted cinematic memorial.
In this respect, Rock Springs distinguishes itself from more opportunistic horror projects -- such as The Forest, which grafted supernatural thrills onto the cultural trauma associated with Japan's Aokigahara suicides. Miao's film is scrupulous where others have been, perhaps, glib.
Yet scruple alone does not guarantee cohesion. The film's ambitions -- historical reckoning, diasporic meditation, ghost story -- remain partially disentangled from one another. The decision to center a Vietnamese American protagonist within a tragedy specific to Chinese immigrants invites productive questions about pan-Asian identity and the fungibility of racialized suffering in America, but the film stops short of fully interrogating that conflation.
Instead, the massacre functions as an atmospheric inheritance, a spectral backdrop against which a fictional family processes private grief. One senses a more bracing, perhaps more confrontational film hovering just beyond reach -- one that would press harder on the uneasy translation of collective trauma into genre metaphor.
As horror, Rock Springs withholds the visceral satisfactions its Midnight slot might promise. As historical remembrance, it gestures toward enormity without entirely integrating it into the drama at hand. The result is a mood piece suspended between reverence and reticence -- earnest, somber, occasionally stirring, yet curiously muted.
The film insists that the past is not past; it lingers, it whispers, it waits. What it does not quite manage is to make that whisper unavoidable.
The film screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.