Pilgrim

Marcus Dunstan’s Pilgrim arrives as part of Hulu’s Into the Dark holiday anthology series, and it’s a turkey that needed more time in the oven. Here’s a Thanksgiving horror film that mistakes tedium for tension and asks us to root for a protagonist less likable than the murderous Puritans stalking her family.

The setup has potential. Mom Anna and Dad Shane lead a blended family drowning in first-world problems. She’s a social media influencer chasing likes. He’s married to his work. Teenage Cody rolls her eyes at everything. Only young Tate registers as human. When Anna hires a troupe of method-acting pilgrims to create authentic Thanksgiving content—part virtue signal, part family therapy—the stage is set for savage commentary on modern self-absorption.

Dunstan stages their arrival with genuine folk-horror menace. The pilgrims never break character. They seem to exist outside time itself. Peter Giles, as their leader Ethan, channels the unsettling intensity of Michael Smiley in “A Field in England.” He’s magnificent. Towering and civil and absolutely wrong in ways you can’t quite articulate. He’s the best reason to watch this film.

Then the second act happens, or rather, doesn’t happen.

The film loses its nerve and its focus. We follow Cody, a teenager so thoroughly unpleasant that I found myself cheering for the homicidal historical reenactors. Yes, her parents are flawed. But they’re not monsters, just distracted suburbanites who’ve given her a life of privilege. Her unrelenting hostility feels unearned. Worse, she learns nothing. No arc, no growth, no reason to care.

The pilgrims remain dangerous and mysterious, but the film forgets to do anything interesting with them. Are they supernatural? One survives a skewer through the skull. But then they succumb to poison like anyone else. The folk horror atmosphere evaporates. The social commentary never arrives. The film even dodges addressing Cody’s mixed-race identity, which might have sharpened its critique of white privilege and period-accurate bigotry.

Then, just when you’re ready to give up on it, the third act explodes in grand guignol excess. Blood doesn’t drip—it geysers from mouths in paint-spraying torrents. Someone uses a severed head as a bludgeon. The film finally unleashes the madness. If only it’d started here.

Had Pilgrim committed to this gonzo energy earlier, we might have a cult classic. Instead, we have Krampus without the creativity, the charm, or the satisfying payoff. That film understood how to balance horror and dark comedy while skewering family dysfunction. This one just skewers people, and not cleverly enough.

Dunstan and co-writer Patrick Melton know how to deliver clever, engaging horror. They proved that with The Collector. But here they’re tasked with putting lipstick on a pig. Polishing a fundamentally flawed script. The bones are there for a savage holiday satire. The meat never materializes, wasting Peter Giles’ magnetic menace on a story that forgets to be about anything.