The R.I.P Man (2025) Review

The R.I.P Man (2025) Review

A new horror villain is spawned as a terrifying, toothless ruthless killer wipes the smile off a quiet English town that holds a dark connection to his mysterious past, bringing brutal Brit slasher mayhem.

From award-winning actor and filmmaker Jamie Langlands (The Cellar), comes a new nail-biting slasher in the vein of Scream meets One Missed Call. Following its award-winning run on the festival circuit, The R.I.P Man is set to haunt UK digital on 5 January 2026, courtesy of Reel2Reel Films.

At the time of writing there’s just a couple of reviews online for director Jamie Langlands’ The R.I.P Man and both are positive. Having now watched the film this comes as a surprise. Perhaps the benchmark for what qualifies as a good film nowadays has dropped in this age of streaming as I was left feeling disappointed. The film’s pacing is leaden, the horror elements are minimal, repetitive, and unsatisfying and the lengthy dialogue nonsensical and dull.

The film’s writer Rhys Thompson favours dialogue scenes that’s sole purpose are to explain the killer’s motivations and build up the killer’s mythology. Fair enough but did they have to be so protracted and dull. So much time is spent doing this that it comes at the expense of anything else – such as a coherent plot and any common sense or logic. It is as if the makers forgot that there is meant to be youngsters in peril or more crucially that a killer is meant to be, well, killing them!

The team behind The R.I.P Man seem to be in such a hurry to establish a franchise that they forget to set out the groundwork here to do so. Horror fans chose their icons, rather than have them thrust upon them and that feels like the case here. On the plus side, a couple of the chosen locations work a treat visually and the cops are right up there with The Naked Gun’s Frank Drebin for laughs, albeit unintentionally.

The R.I.P. Man is on digital 5 January from Reel2Reel Films

Trailer