Vera Miao‘s directorial debut, Rock Springs, is ambitious, impatient, and sometimes beautifully uneven; it demands to be felt just as much as understood. The story moves between and intertwines (at least) two time periods, the present and 1880s, in one geographical location: Rock Springs, Wyoming. It explores how memory, violence, heritage, and music are passed down like heirlooms… Or curses.
Rock Springs debuted at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight category, a timeslot reserved for horror and experimental movies. Miao has produced, acted, and written for numerous projects, but this is her first time taking full control of the narrative. As an immigrant born in Guam to Taiwanese parents, it’s natural that a story about the Asian diaspora in the U.S. is the first one she wanted to tell.
Central to Rock Springs are Emily (Kelly Marie Tran, most known for her role as Rose Tico in The Last Jedi) and her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim). Fiona Fu rounds out the three generations of the family as Emily’s mother-in-law and Gracie’s Nai Nai.
Emily moves the whole family to the small town of Rock Springs when she takes a job in the music department of a community college. They don’t know that their new remote cabin is the location of the 1885 Rock Springs massacre. European immigrants murdered 28 Chinese immigrants, injured 15 others, and burned 78 homes over disputes about coal mining wages. No one was prosecuted for this horrific event.
Whereas Emily is Vietnamese and was adopted, her deceased husband was ethnically Chinese, and his mother only speaks Mandarin. Young Gracie is the only one who can communicate with both her mother and grandmother, but, since her father’s death, she hasn’t said a word (a character choice that is such a common trope in horror, it’s now a cliché).
They are supported by a strong cast, which includes a burly Benedict Wong as Ah Tseng during the scenes set in the 1880s. His paternal steadfastness grounds the film in its second act, and he is terrifying when needed. Jimmy O. Yang, too, is well cast. Tran plays Emily with an unrelenting tightness; a mother who is desperate to manage her pain and grief while trying to raise and shield her child from both. Gracie is calm, fierce, and tender when needed, and Aria Kim glides across that range with ease. Fiona Fu fulfils the wizened mystic role, teaching Gracie how to mourn and celebrate the dead so they can rest easy in the afterlife. Her love of listening to Erhu, a two-stringed, bowed Chinese fiddle, connects Nai Nai to the Chinese immigrants and threads through to Emily’s cello playing, blending generations and cultures with tonal echoes. The score and diegetic music aren’t just background; they pull the past and present together so they are less separate than they seem.
Rock Springs takes risks that are, at best, intriguing and at worst, unnecessary. Miao feels like a bold filmmaker trying to create her own language. She splices the narrative with what seem like dream sequences. Gracie alone, and then both Emily and Gracie, wander through a burial ground, a space where the past and present meet. These moments are unsettling and circular. They serve as connections to the past and future and somewhat anchor the plot, but highlight more questions than they answer.
The cinematography in Rock Springs is a key part of the experimentation: rigid bird’s-eye shots depict the house and forest like dioramas. Sudden ground-level angles look up at trees and sky as if we are the ground, reversing a typical sense of scale and safety. Miao often uses macro and fisheye lenses to destabilise the camera. Faces and objects stretch or are cut off by the frame. A memorable choice is shooting Emily and Gracie’s car ride into town upside down, which, to be fair, feels more like a physical manifestation of anxiety and descending into another world than purely a gimmick.
Miao’s camera frequently plays with points of view. We see through characters’ eyes as characters stare back, directly into the lens. Miao bucks a common horror trope by letting the characters see and hear horrors, ghosts, and the uncanny before we do, muting the scare but building the slow, mounting dread. The payoff comes later in a single jump scare when Emily and Gracie are alone in the woods. Because it’s rare, it makes an impact. It’s refreshingly restrained in a genre that can often pride itself on how often its audience screams. Rock Springs is also something of a monster horror with a heart, and it’s this unique angle that sets it apart from other indie horror releases.
Whistling also recurs throughout the film, serving as a punctuation against the long, composed stills of the new house and the misty, breathing woods around it. The peeling wallpaper clashes with the dark paint in Emily’s bedroom paint scheme (a yin and yang of competing decor). An eye painted over the fireplace becomes a small, unsettling symbol: someone’s always watching, and sometimes those being watched become the watchers. Rock Springs‘ Vancouver locations stand in for Wyoming, which doesn’t quite match. It’s obvious to anyone who has watched Twilight or Twin Peaks that the on-screen locations are in the Pacific Northwest, not the Mountain West.
The historical backdrop of Rock Springs is crucial. The movie references real-world tragedies, particularly the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when many Chinese miners were killed amid widespread anti-Chinese violence in the American West shortly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. While the townsfolk aren’t openly murderous in the present, they are still racially insensitive and openly use slurs. This intersection of brutal history and a reminder of how much work still needs to be done serves as the film’s moral core.
Rock Springs is ambitious and often over-eager with its experimental flair. But with a great cast and important message, it’s a debut that beckons an encore.
