Rock Springs works within a familiar genre framework––a family moves to a home in a town filled with strange people and is promptly haunted by spirits––to probe deeper ideas on the immigrant experience while exploring a Buddhist view of the afterlife.
Divided into chapters, each from a different perspective, the film opens on Grace (Aria Kim), a young girl who hasn’t talked since her father’s death months ago. She sees him in her nightmares, however, which take place in a spare vision of an underworld filled with dirt mounds surrounded by an all-enveloping darkness. Her mother Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) is worried about her daughter’s muteness, while her Chinese mother-in-law is worried about the new home’s single bathroom.
This first chapter plays on the natural disorientation of being a young kid in a new place with no friends. It builds to a jump scare, but before we see what happens next, the second chapter takes us back to 1885 Rock Springs. We’re in a cabin watching Chinese miners gamble with one another after work. He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang) discusses cutting off his braid to Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong). It’s an act of assimilation, which Tseng implores him not to do, expressing regret for cutting his own hair. Whenever homesick, Tseng tells them they can look at the sky and imagine they’re back home in China.
Rock Springs efficiently grants us a sense of who these miners are in relation to one another as well as to this new country. The scene’s pleasant but melancholic feeling is disrupted when white miners attack the village. The scale of the ensuing violence is impressive, as the action moves from the burning village into the woods—the escaping survivors pursued by the white townsfolk all night. Onscreen text at film’s end explains that this Rock Springs Massacre actually occurred, and at least 28 Chinese miners were killed in the brutal attack.
This next segment from the mother’s point-of-view shows limitations in the film’s shifting perspective, non-linear structure. Learning that a scream from behind a closed door in the opening act is actually from the mother reacting to the ghost of her dead husband plays as clever plotting for its own sake. And after that opening act ends with the tease of the daughter being yanked into the woods by this creature, considerable time is devoted to the 1885 flashback which sets up the creation of this creature—visualized beautifully through a time-lapse vision of dead bodies melding together. Though patience is tested for the present-day sequence to then jump back in time again, compositions of the creature hiding out in the woods are striking. Sometimes it’s seen as an eye peeking through the brush, or a hand on the ground which draws back when the mother looks its way.
Rock Springs’ conclusion makes sense narratively and thematically, but feels abrupt––the danger of this monster explained away too easily. Yet with its inspired creature, underworld design, and ambitious flashback sequence, it effectively examines the immigrant experience through a traditional horror structure.
Rock Springs premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.