Marshmallow is a film from 2025 that mainly belongs to the horror genre. If you check out the trailer below, you’ll probably think the same thing I thought. Marshmallow is a Friday the 13th clone or at least a very tyåicla slasher set in a summer camp environment. Because it is, sort of. There is a summer camp, and there is someone in a mask hunting the kids down one by one. Furthermore, there is the typical campfire scary tale where someone from the crew scares the kids at the end of the tale. You know the drill.
We get to follow a really shy kid, Morgan, on his first time there. He doesn’t want to go and feels forced by his parents to be there. He’s an outsider and you can’t help but feel sorry for him as he gets bullied by some other kids. Marshmallow has managed to get us to feel sympathy for him. Perhaps because we get to follow him a bit before the camp and find out that his life is not so easy to begin with. Of course, every minute of his life at the summer camp isn’t a living hell. He also makes some friends, which is nice to see.
The acting of Marshmallow
The acting is quite nice all the way through the film, even if the first half or so of Marshmallow is quite lame. It’s low-paced and very uninteresting. When you expect a horror film and get a film that seems to portray everyday life in a summer camp, you tend to get quite disappointed. I would have wanted it to get hold of me a little bit more. It’s quite dull and there are no really scary moments in the first half of it or so. There’s more than the usual stuff about the camp leaders making out every chance they get and stuff like that. Some of those leaders don’t seem to want to be there, are others shouldn’t be there since they have no idea how to approach a child. But that’s just my opinion, of course.
To be completely honest, I was about to give up on Marshmallow when I realised that I was only halfway through and it felt like it had been going on for at least twice as long. But then it finally starts to happen things. We get introduced to what seems to be the campfire story that has come to life. Someone is starting to show up, and the face I covered with a mask. Quite slashery – right?
The second half of Marshmallow is pretty exciting and suspenseful. At times, you don’t really understand the logic between the scenes and how the character can move from one end of the camp to the other at such speed. It seems to be at multiple places all at once. Again, if you’re familiar with films like Friday the 13th, that’s nothing to worry about. These things happen in films like this.
I, for one, started speculating how everything could be connected. I guess that is in my nature and might not have so much to do with Marshmallow as a movie. I had all kinds of weird theories about some of the characters being ghosts, that it all took place in a dream, and stuff like that. I won’t tell you what the solution is, but I can say that I didn’t figure it out all the way through. I might have had a few pieces of the puzzle, but I never really connected them.
You might be disappointed when you learn what’s really going on, or you might not be. But one thing is certain: Marshmallow is a regular slasher, even if it had all the ingredients to be on from the very beginning. Unfortunately, it suffers from a very uninteresting first half, and the ending cannot make up for that. Plus, I think that maybe there was one twist too many at the very end. But that’s me. Maybe you’ll enjoy it immensely.
