The New Mutants

Imagine being a teenager, trapped in a sterile room, waiting for your life to start while the world outside slowly forgets you exist. For three long years, that wasn't just the plot of The New Mutants—it was the film’s actual reality. Filmed in 2017 and left to gather dust in the Disney-Fox merger purgatory until 2020, this movie became a sort of cinematic urban legend. When it finally limped into theaters during a global pandemic, the narrative was already written: it was a "disaster," a "mess," the "black sheep" of the X-Men franchise. But now that the dust has settled and the franchise-war noise has quieted, I find myself looking back at this weird, clunky, earnest little horror movie with a surprising amount of affection.

The Cursed Production of Medfield State

To understand why this movie feels so distinct—and so disjointed—you have to look at where it came from. Director Josh Boone (the guy behind The Fault in Our Stars) didn’t want to make a soaring superhero epic. He wanted to make The Breakfast Club in a haunted house. He actually filmed the thing at Medfield State Hospital, a shuttered asylum in Massachusetts that provided its own built-in dread. Apparently, the production was so eerie that Henry Zaga and Maisie Williams reported feeling genuinely "watched" while filming in the basement.

The film follows Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a young Cheyenne girl who survives a mysterious disaster only to wake up in a facility run by Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga). She’s joined by a group of troubled teens who are just as likely to kill her as they are to befriend her. You’ve got Sam (Charlie Heaton), a Southern boy with explosive baggage; Rahne (Maisie Williams), a repressed Catholic girl with a wolfish secret; Roberto (Henry Zaga), a rich kid who literally burns anyone he touches; and the undisputed star of the show, Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy).

Anya Taylor-Joy and the Demon Bear

If there is one reason to watch this film today, it’s Anya Taylor-Joy. She plays Illyana (the sister of Colossus for you X-Men nerds) with a sneering, racist-adjacent hostility that masks deep-seated trauma. She walks around with a hand-puppet named Lockheed and gives a performance that feels like it belongs in a much weirder, more aggressive movie. While the rest of the cast is playing a somber YA drama, she is leaning into the camp and the chaos.

The horror mechanics here are a mixed bag. The "Smiley Men"—creatures from Illyana’s past—are genuinely unsettling with their elongated limbs and frozen, stitched-on grins. But the film struggles to decide if it wants to be a jump-scare fest or a character study. I watched this on a laptop while balancing a lukewarm bowl of instant ramen on my knees, and honestly, the intimate, "small-scale" vibe actually worked better on a small screen than it did on a giant IMAX canvas. It’s a claustrophobic movie.

The climax involves the "Demon Bear," a massive, ethereal entity that looks like it was ripped straight from the psychedelic comic art of Bill Sienkiewicz. It’s a bold visual choice, though the CGI occasionally feels a bit thin, likely a casualty of the film's long delay and lack of a final polish.

The Cult of the Misunderstood

The New Mutants is a cult classic in the making because it represents the end of an era. It was the final gasp of the 20th Century Fox X-Men universe—a universe that was messy, inconsistent, but often willing to take strange risks that the modern, hyper-polished MCU usually avoids. It’s the only superhero movie that features a sincere, central queer romance between Dani and Rahne, and it treats their connection with a gentleness that felt revolutionary for a big-budget Marvel property in 2020.

The Trivia You Might Have Missed:

The Missing Cameo: There was originally a post-credits scene planned featuring Jon Hamm as Mr. Sinister, but it was scrapped when the merger happened. The Sienkiewicz Connection: Bill Sienkiewicz, the artist who defined the look of the "Demon Bear" comics in the 80s, actually has a small cameo as a man in a photo. Zero Reshoots: Despite years of rumors that Disney was reshooting the movie to make it scarier (or funnier, or more "Marvel-y"), Josh Boone eventually confirmed that the version released is almost exactly what he shot in 2017. The Pitch: Boone originally pitched this as a trilogy of horror-superhero films, with the second being an alien-invasion horror and the third a supernatural apocalypse. * Historical Accuracy: Many of the medical props seen in the background of the Medfield State Hospital were actually left over from the building's days as a functioning institution.

Ultimately, The New Mutants is a flawed experiment that deserves a second look. It’s not the disaster the internet told you it was; it’s just a quiet, moody teen drama that happens to have superpowers and a giant spirit bear. It captures that specific "us against the world" teenage angst perfectly, even if the script occasionally trips over its own feet. If you’re tired of multiverses and world-ending stakes, this 94-minute haunt is a refreshing, if slightly bumpy, change of pace.