“The Mannequin,” written and directed by John Berardo, stars Isabella Gomez as Liana Rojas, with Lindsay Lavanchy, Shireen Lai, Maxwell Hamilton, Gabriella Rivera, Krystle Martin, and Jack Sochet rounding out the ensemble. It is a sharply controlled supernatural horror film whose craft makes it easy to see why programmers and genre fans have latched onto it. From the opening frames, Berardo announces himself as a gifted genre stylist with a distinctly modern sensibility—emotionally driven, visually precise, and attuned to the rhythms of contemporary horror.
“The Mannequin” finds Berardo turning a single downtown Los Angeles building into a claustrophobic maze of memory, ambition, and menace. The film is a pleasure to look at and listen to, with a clean, sculpted visual language and calibrated sound design that give its haunted-building setup a fresh, contemporary jolt.
At the center is Liana Rojas, a stylist assistant drawn back to the loft where her fashion-designer sister died, only to discover a lingering presence tied to a photographer-turned-killer who mutilated women decades earlier. The story braids grief, stalled creative drive, and generational violence, using the haunting as a stand-in for how harm done to women lingers in working spaces and artistic communities long after the headlines fade.
Rather than leaning on elaborate twists, the film is more invested in the emotional weight of returning to a site that is at once a graveyard and a workplace. The curse becomes a metaphor for unprocessed trauma seeping into rooms, relationships, and career paths, turning once-bright dreams into something warped, frightening, and difficult to escape.
Isabella Gomez’s take on Liana in “The Mannequin” did not fully click for me; the performance often feels more constructed than lived-in, even as Berardo clearly aims for a layered mix of resolve, grief, and creative exhaustion. Gabriella Rivera, similarly, does not quite leave the indelible impression the role of Sophia calls for, which softens the sisters’ dynamic and keeps their bond from fully anchoring the film’s emotional core.
Across the ensemble, the casting lands just a notch above serviceable, which slightly dulls the impact of certain set pieces and the otherwise rich ideas the script is engaging with. What makes this feel especially notable is how assured Berardo’s direction remains throughout. His command of tone, pacing, and visual storytelling is evident in nearly every scene, making “The Mannequin” feel like a film whose ambitions occasionally outpace the performances supporting them.
Visually, “The Mannequin” is striking from its monochrome prologue onward, with Berardo leaning into bold contrasts, graphic compositions, and a sculptural sense of bodies in space. The production design turns mannequins, fabric, and industrial architecture into a gallery of unnerving images that read like fashion photography pushed into nightmare territory.
The sound design is equally considered: distant clanks, stray echoes, and layered ambient noise keep even quiet moments charged. When violence arrives, the combination of textured practical work and sharp sonic punctuation lands with force without breaking the film’s carefully sustained mood.
For much of its runtime, “The Mannequin” favors slow accumulation over constant shocks—background shifts, off-screen sounds, and the persistent sense that the loft itself is watching. That patience gives the horror a lived-in quality, as if it is steadily infiltrating the characters’ lives rather than simply lunging at them.
The final stretch pivots into a more overt supernatural confrontation, folding in exorcism elements and effects-driven set pieces that push the film into louder, more fevered territory. Even when that escalation feels more aggressive than the earlier restraint, the confidence of the staging keeps it from feeling careless. Instead, it plays as an intentional release—and as further proof of Berardo’s instincts as a filmmaker.
It is clear that writer-director John Berardo is a talent worth following. “The Mannequin” signals a first-rate future—one that, with stronger casting choices to match the sophistication of his craft, could place him among the most compelling voices working in contemporary genre cinema.
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