Just as tension over immigration reaches a boiling point in our country, Two Sentence Horror Stories‘ writer-director Vera Miao‘s sobering feature debut arrives to trace a grim but familiar line between America’s violent past and present. Rock Springs explores over a century’s worth of racial trauma through a Chinese-American family, though the historical horror here is monstrous in more ways than one.
A surreal nightmare introduces Grace (Aria Kim), a young girl still grieving over the loss of her father. Her also grieving mom, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), relocates them along with Grace’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu) to the quaint Wyoming town of Rock Springs for a fresh start. The problem is that Emily, a Westernized adopted Vietnamese woman, isn’t savvy about the Chinese customs that she’d married into and dismisses Nai Nai’s cautions of Ghost Month, a period in which the gates of hell are open. Their arrival awakens something monstrous from the town’s horrific past, and it’s lurking in the woods right behind their new home.
Photo by Rocks Springs LLC.
Miao structures her feature debut into three parts, starting with Grace’s perspective as she silently explores the area, seemingly a beacon for otherworldly horrors. This chapter establishes muted atmospherics and draws heavily from Hereditary in tone and horror mechanics, complete with almost dizzying upside-down shots overhead. The ghost of Emily’s husband lingers in darkened corners, threatening her careful facade barely containing the sorrow she’s been shielding from her remaining family, and it’s only exacerbated by Grace’s strange behavior.
Yet Miao is almost too restrained in this first act, limiting details to recontextualize later with additional perspective shifts. An early scene of Grace eavesdropping on what she presumes to be her mother’s stifled sobs behind closed doors is actually Emily attempting to choke back screams of terror when Rock Springs eventually shifts to her perspective. While the core family unit is fairly threadbare in characterization and background, outside of their shared mourning, the fraught mother/daughter relationship provides the backbone that provides hope in an increasingly bleak endeavor.
That’s because Rock Springs dramatically shifts gears in its middle section, changing tone and pace for a harrowing rewind to the town in 1885. It’s the film’s knockout centerpiece that sees a close-knit community of Chinese mine workers, most of whom have plans to return to their families back home, enjoying a day off, only to fall prey to one devastatingly cruel siege by the town’s white miners. Benedict Wong adds heartbreaking complexity to Ah Tseng, a miner harboring a lot of unspoken pain and trauma, who warns his optimistic nephew (Ricky He) not to give himself so willingly to a hostile country that doesn’t want him. It’s a heavy foreshadowing of the gruesome violence on the immediate horizon.
Cinematographer Heyjin Jun captures the ensuing massacre with unflinching immediacy, injecting the sleepy ghost story with a surprisingly visceral shot of adrenaline. Ah Tseng’s helplessness is as devastating as the slaughter itself, and Miao doesn’t hold back from depicting the gory cruelty, even making sure to note white women’s complicity in racist evils.
Kelly Marie Tran appears in Rock Springs by Vera Miao, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Rocks Springs LLC.
History is indeed a vicious monster, with Miao pulling from the Rock Springs Massacre to craft a Chinese-American ghost story exposing another dark corner of America’s past. The strange fleshy beast teased in glimpses congeals for a full-blown creature feature third act that sounds way more interesting in concept than execution. Not helping is that the creature design isn’t particularly, well, fleshed out, or easy to grasp in intent.
In a film where the ghosts and skeletons in Rock Springs’ closet are never as insidious as the cruelty that birthed them, the finale loses its edge as it rushes toward a superficial though no less poignant tribute to the forgotten.
Rock Springs‘ narrative structure occasionally proves a bit unwieldy, struggling to bridge the underdeveloped personal family drama at the center to the larger, far more effective theme of racial trauma and horror. Miao executes her vision with clear purpose when it comes to the past, but leans too heavily on influences for the present.
Emily’s personal plight to keep her family together ultimately feels like a superficial means of relaying the true horror here, a historical tragedy that should’ve served as a lesson, one that’s painfully still necessary today.
Rock Springs made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Release info TBD.