The Hanged Man (2025) Film Review [Another Hole in the Head Film Festival]

Posted on by Liz Griffiths

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The Hanged Man is a 2025 American horror film written and directed by Korab Uka. A doorman is unexpectedly invited to a dinner at the secluded estate of one of the wealthy families he serves. But as the evening unfolds, he begins to suspect that the invitation wasn’t just an act of kindness.

On a technical and narrative level, The Hanged Man is not a good film. Its ambitions far exceed its execution, and it repeatedly reaches for thematic depth it never quite achieves. And yet—despite my best efforts—it lingered with me long after the credits rolled, not because it was profound or thought-provoking, or even particularly scary, but because it was relentlessly bleak.

Wasting no time with exposition, the film opens on a man crying/laughing, then cuts quickly to an uncomfortable family dinner scene that clearly exists for no other reason than to show the audience what cartoonishly despicable people our main characters are. In attendance at this dinner is the family’s doorman, who we recognize as the man from the opening scene. After a very bizarre meal is served and the conversation turns from mildly bigoted to that of a bunch of out-of-touch racists suffering from severe affluenza, the special guest storms out, understandably horrified by his employers’ behavior. What follows is a fever dream of sickness and depravity with no real purpose other than a high-minded, morally ambiguous ending.

The film’s power lies in its quiet cruelty. Rather than relying on overt shocks, The Hanged Man depicts psychological and sexual abuse in a subdued, matter-of-fact, almost soft way that is deeply uncomfortable to watch. There is no catharsis here, no dramatic framing to soften the blow. The abuse is portrayed as isolating, mundane, and inescapable, which makes it feel disturbingly real. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t announce itself—it just sits there, heavy and suffocating.

In not being overly violent or gory, The Hanged Man is actually sort of brilliant, though perhaps not intentionally. Films like Salo or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), August Underground’s Mordum(2003) , and A Serbian Film (2010) are so brutal in their depiction of sexual assault, graphic violence, and just general depravity that they tend to only attract viewers looking for the worst of the worst; the most horrific and disturbing films. In not marketing itself as extreme cinema, The Hanged Man attracts viewers looking for more standard horror fare. Viewers who are likely unprepared for how unsettling and upsetting this film truly is, and how deeply it burrows under the skin. 

That restraint is also where the film stumbles. The Hanged Man clearly wants to be saying something important about trauma, control, and victimhood, but it never develops those ideas beyond surface-level symbolism and analogies that are punch-you-in-the-face obvious. What it presents as depth often feels more like vagueness, leaving the audience to do emotional heavy lifting that the film itself refuses to commit to.

Still, there’s no denying its effectiveness. This is a movie that worms its way into your brain not through insight, but through atmosphere and emotional attrition. It is grim, joyless, and quietly cruel—and those qualities make it difficult to dismiss entirely. The Hanged Man may not succeed as a thoughtful exploration of its themes, but it does succeed in being profoundly unsettling, the kind of film you wish you could forget and then realize, days later, that you can’t.

We watched The Hanged Man (2025) as part of this year’s Another Hole in the Head Film Festival.

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