Worldbreaker

If you told me five years ago that we’d eventually get bored of "tears in the fabric of reality," I would have laughed while clutching my ticket to whatever multiverse extravaganza was playing at the time. But here we are in 2025, and "dimensional rifts" have become the new "zombie outbreak"—a convenient shorthand for "everything is ruined, and everyone is grumpy." Yet, Brad Anderson’s Worldbreaker manages to claw its way out of the heap of derivative sci-fi by doing what Anderson does best: making the end of the world feel claustrophobic, damp, and deeply personal.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while my neighbor was power-washing his driveway, and honestly, the muffled, rhythmic drone of the water against the pavement synced up so perfectly with the film’s low-frequency sound design that I thought the dimensional rift was opening in my backyard. It’s that kind of movie—one that bleeds into your surroundings if you let it.

The Survivalist’s Dilemma

The setup is lean, which I appreciated. We don’t get thirty minutes of scientists in lab coats pointing at glowing monitors. We jump in five years after the "Breaking," where creatures from another dimension have essentially turned Earth into a cosmic buffet. Luke Evans plays the Dad (simply "Dad" in the credits, which is a bit on-the-nose for the archetype), and he’s spent the intervening years turning a remote island into a survivalist's fever dream for his daughter, Willa, played with a sharp, guarded intensity by Billie Boullet.

Luke Evans is in peak "stern protector" mode here. He has this way of looking at a horizon that suggests he can see the exact moment the atoms are going to start vibrating incorrectly. The chemistry between him and Billie Boullet is the engine of the film. It isn't the "protect the child" dynamic we saw in The Last of Us; it’s more "prepare the child to be a weapon." There’s a ruthlessness to the training that feels uncomfortable, and that’s where the horror really starts to seep in. It’s not just about the monsters outside; it’s about the monster you have to become to survive the monsters outside.

Shadows, Not Shaders

Director Brad Anderson has always been a master of the "unreliable space." Whether it’s the crumbling asylum in Session 9 or the industrial rot of The Machinist, he knows how to make a location feel like it’s actively rooting for your demise. In Worldbreaker, the island—which should be a sanctuary—feels like a cage. Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography leans heavily into desaturated greens and murky grays, making the lush landscape feel diseased.

When the creatures finally show up, they aren't the over-designed, CGI-heavy monstrosities we've grown accustomed to in $200 million blockbusters. They are twitchy, unsettling, and—thankfully—often obscured by shadow or perspective. The monsters look like a bad dream had by a geometry textbook, defying easy physical logic in a way that actually justifies the "alternate dimension" premise. There’s a specific sequence involving a shed and a flickering lantern that gave me the genuine "legs-up-on-the-couch" creeps, a feat I didn't think jump-scares could still achieve in 2025.

The Jovovich Factor

And then there’s Milla Jovovich. Entering the film as "Mom," she represents the emotional ghost haunting the island. For a while, I was worried she’d be relegated to grainy flashback duty, but the screenplay by Joshua Rollins is smarter than that. Jovovich brings a frantic, tragic energy to the role that contrasts beautifully with Evans' stoic pragmatism. In a contemporary cinema landscape where we often complain about "disposable" characters, her presence feels weighty.

Interestingly, there’s been some chatter on social media about the "streaming-first" look of certain scenes. While it’s true that you can tell this didn’t have a Marvel-sized budget, I’d argue that the film’s occasional grit is a feature, not a bug. In an era of virtual production and "The Volume" making everything look suspiciously perfect, the tactile, muddy reality of Worldbreaker is refreshing. It feels like a movie made by people who actually got their boots dirty.

Apparently, the production had to move locations three times due to actual extreme weather events, which Bradley Gallo and the production team supposedly leaned into, using real storm footage to bolster the film's sense of environmental collapse. That authenticity pays off; when the wind howls in this movie, you feel it in your teeth.

Worldbreaker doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does remind you why the wheel was a good invention in the first place. It’s a tight, 95-minute exercise in tension that prioritizes atmosphere over world-building lore. It captures that very 2020s anxiety—the feeling that the world we knew is gone and we’re all just waiting for the other shoe to drop from a different dimension. If you’re looking for a sci-fi thriller that cares as much about character trauma as it does about creature design, this is well worth your 5-minute bus wait—and the 90 minutes that follow.