Let’s be clear from the outset: Hyde is not a movie you “enjoy.” It is not a film you casually stream on a Friday night with a bowl of popcorn. To do so would be like reading a clinical diagnosis of a terminal illness for light amusement. No, Hyde is an experience—a meticulously crafted, psychologically grueling, and profoundly disturbing descent into a madness that feels terrifyingly contemporary. Directed with surgical precision by Jane Campion, this 2025 reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic is less a monster movie and more a scalpel taken to the fragile veneer of modern masculinity.
The film’s genius lies in its setting. Gone is the fog-drenched, cobblestoned London of the 19th century. In its place is the sterile, glass-and-steel landscape of a near-future metropolis, a world of mindfulness apps, corporate wellness mandates, and performative perfection. Our Dr. Henry Jekyll (a career-defining, gut-wrenching performance by Paul Mescal) is not a Victorian gentleman scientist, but a celebrated “wellness architect.” He is the guru behind “Elysian,” a bio-tracking platform that promises to optimize human potential by suppressing negative emotions. Jekyll is the epitome of success: polished, empathetic, and utterly controlled. He is a man who has systematized happiness, and in doing so, has built a prison of his own making.
Campion and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema frame this world in cold, symmetrical compositions. Offices are vast, white, and empty. Apartments are minimalist showrooms. The colour palette is dominated by blues and greys, punctuated only by the calming, hypnotic glow of screens. It’s a world that prizes order above all else, and the camera’s unblinking gaze makes you feel the immense pressure of maintaining that order. The sound design is equally oppressive, a constant, low hum of climate control and distant traffic that becomes the white noise of repression.
The central plot device—the potion—is brilliantly updated. Jekyll’s formula is not a magical elixir but an extreme neuro-steroid, a “therapeutic” tool he develops to completely eradicate trauma and anxiety. It’s the logical, terrifying endpoint of his life’s work. The first time he injects it, the transformation is not the grotesque, bone-cracking spectacle of old Universal monster films. Instead, it’s a subtle, horrifying shift. Mescal’s body language changes in an instant. The tension in his shoulders vanishes. The placid kindness in his eyes is replaced by a flat, predatory calm. He doesn’t become a hulking brute; he becomes something far more frightening: a man utterly free of consequence.
This is where the film earns its title. Edward Hyde is not a separate entity lurking within; he is the id unleashed. He is the repressed anger, the primal lust, the cynical contempt, and the violent impulses that Jekyll has spent a lifetime medicating and masking. As Hyde, Mescal is a revelation. He moves through the world with a swaggering, amoral confidence. He says the cruel things Jekyll thinks but would never utter. He takes what he wants. The “monstrous” acts Hyde commits are not random acts of violence; they are targeted, intelligent destructions of the very systems Jekyll upholds. He doesn’t just attack people; he dismantles reputations, corrupts data, and exposes the hypocrisies of the elite. He is chaos incarnate, and in a world built on brittle control, chaos is the ultimate weapon.
The most chilling aspect of Hyde is how it makes you complicit. There are moments, particularly in the first half of the film, where Hyde’s actions feel… liberating. When he verbally eviscerates a smarmy investor or walks away from a crushing social obligation, a part of you cheers. Campion masterfully taps into our own collective id—our desire to tell off our boss, to abandon our responsibilities, to stop caring. This is the film’s central, brilliant trap. It makes you understand the seduction of the monster before forcing you to witness its true, horrifying cost. The third act descends into a nightmarish spiral as the distinction between Jekyll and Hyde blurs, and the transformations begin to happen without the serum. The monster is no longer a choice; it is the default state.
The supporting cast is superb, but this is Mescal’s film. He delivers a dual performance of such raw physical and emotional intensity that it’s often difficult to watch. You see the desperate, pleading humanity in Jekyll’s eyes as he loses control, and the chilling void in Hyde’s gaze. The final scenes, which I will not spoil, feature a confrontation in a mirror-lined room that is one of the most breathtaking and psychologically complex pieces of filmmaking I have ever witnessed. It’s a sequence that will be studied and debated for years to come.
Hyde is a demanding film. It is slow-paced, deliberately opaque at times, and offers no easy answers or cathartic resolutions. It will leave you feeling unsettled, anxious, and morally queasy. Some will undoubtedly label it pretentious or unbearably bleak. But to dismiss it on those terms is to miss the point entirely.
In the end, Hyde is not about a man turning into a monster. It is about the monster we are all asked to create in order to function in a sanitized, emotionally stifling society. It’s about the rage we swallow, the desires we suppress, and the perfect personas we curate online. The film argues that this repression is not sustainability but a slow-acting poison. The real horror is not the beast that emerges, but the society that makes the beast necessary.
Hyde is a masterpiece of psychological horror, a film that holds up a black mirror to our own fractured souls. It is uncomfortable, essential, and unforgettable. You may not like what you see, but you cannot look away.
Final Rating: 5/5 – A devastating, timely, and flawless work of art.
