Movie Review: ET TU

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 25th, 2025 / 12:37 PM

ET TU movie poster | ©2025 Buffalo 8 Productions

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Lou Diamond Phillips, Malcolm McDowell, Antwone Barnes, Isabella Blake-Thomas, Rachel Alig, Brennan Keel Cook, Jaclyn Mofid, Trevor James, Timothy Patrick Cavanaugh
Writer: Max Tzannes
Director: Max Tzannes
Distributor: Buffalo 8 Productions
Release Date: July 25, 2025 (VOD)

ET TU is a very dark theatrical horror comedy that succeeds in large part because writer/director Max Tzannes and his leading man Lou Diamond Phillips understand the value of quiet exasperation. While the film revolves around Shakespeare, this is not THEATER OF BLOOD – although there winds up being quite a lot of blood in the theatre.

Phillips plays Brent, a veteran stage director who agreed to helm a regional production of William Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR at a venue that (as we learn) has quite a history. With the show open for a continuing run, Brent must stay and supervise, and he’s suffering for it.

Chief among the thorns in Brent’s side is Marcus (Brennan Keel Cook), who has the starring role of Brutus. Marcus not coincidentally is the son of theatre owner Roger (Timothy Patrick Cavanaugh) and was therefore cast as a condition of the production.

Added to Marcus’s underwhelming performance and misunderstanding of the text is his habit of “playfully” stabbing fellow actors and crew with the retractable prop dagger. Prop master Vicky (Jaclyn Mofid) is afraid that Marcus is going to mix up the retractable blade with the dull but real one and kill somebody. She begs Brent to dissuade the young man from his pranks.

Brent’s wife and producer Nadine (Rachel Alig) is concerned for his general well-being, noting that he’s becoming more distracted and depressed as the production proceeds.

This doesn’t immediately go where we expect, and there are a number of surprises along the way. Phillips embodies many directors whom theatre (and TV and film) folks will have encountered over the years, someone who’s dying to be incendiary but trying to be professional and keep the peace.

Cook is suitably callow and cocky, and Mofid and Alig radiate alarmed decency. Antwone Barnes and Isabella Blake-Thomas are both charismatic and passionate as a pair of smitten and ambitious understudies.

Then there is Malcolm McDowell as an extremely knowledgeable janitor. He is simultaneously airily jovial and deeply menacing.

Without banging us over the head, filmmaker Tzannes conveys with a potent mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude what it’s like to sit through bad Shakespeare of one’s own making night after night. He manages to fit nearly the whole of ET TU into the environs of California’s Covina for the Performing Arts, a crafty feat of production economy.

This isn’t said to bury ET TU, but neither to over-praise it – it is consistently wryly amusing and watchable, but almost never hilarious.

Still, it is said that dying is easy, comedy is hard. It’s clearly easier to make a straight slasher than one that is effectively humorous, but Tzannes and Company thread that needle here.

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Very dark theatrical horror comedy

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Article: Movie Review: ET TU

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