Late on her birthday, a troubled young woman shows up at her father’s house, seeking a place to crash after a fight with her boyfriend. Dad’s asleep, so she settles on the couch for an annual tradition: watching an old VHS tape filled with well-wishes from her mother, who recorded them after a devastating cancer diagnosis meant she wouldn’t get to see her daughter grow up.
That could be the start of a melodrama, and there’s an element of that in the Australian release Posthumous, from director Josh Tanner, who co-wrote with Jade van der Lei. But horror is the main draw here, something made clear by the jarring, tracking-addled tape snippets sprinkled in from the very beginning, letting you know something spooky is afoot even before the story gets there.
The only memories Zoe (Sophie Lowe) has of her mother, Joanne (Kira-Che Heelan), come from that precious slice of vintage media, and it’s becoming clear that Zoe’s inability to embrace responsibility and adulthood stems from unresolved feelings about losing her mom so young. Her dad, Neil (David Roberts), is an emotional zombie; her boyfriend, Alex (Remy Hii), means well but is too pushy in his efforts to help.
So you can’t blame Zoe for getting extremely excited when she discovers her father’s been hiding a stack of pictures of her mother. At last, she’s got some glimpses of Joanne’s life beyond the familiar frames of that VHS tape.
One image shows Joanne and Neil smiling with their next-door neighbors, but when Zoe wanders over to connect with Brenda (Doris Younane), curious to learn more about Joanne—who died when she was 30, exactly the age Zoe just turned—the woman slams the door in her face. Even worse, she still has the photos in her hand when she does it.
Neil dismisses Brenda as a “nutcase,” and we get a sense of that from her peculiar reaction to Zoe. But that doesn’t stop Zoe from sneaking into Brenda’s dark, cluttered house, intent on grabbing back her photos and maybe doing some additional snooping. And she does indeed find more remnants of Joanne there, including another VHS tape stashed among the piles of witchy stuff in a weird room upstairs.
Its contents are disturbing, and the tape has warped a bit over the last three decades. Even if Zoe could figure out exactly what she was looking at, she still wouldn’t be able to watch it all the way through. As Zoe desperately tries to puzzle together the truth about what she’s discovered, Posthumous takes a turn for the supernatural, digging into the idea that maybe documenting everything isn’t always the best course of action.
At its heart, Posthumous is about Zoe working through a lifetime of trauma she’s stubbornly refused to address, no thanks to Neil, who has a similar reluctance to face his own pain. But the creepy revelation of what’s depicted on the second tape—and the sinister way it ties into those cherished birthday messages Joanne left behind—take the story into some unexpected places, with the grainy, grimy VHS tapes providing a uniquely eerie filter over it.
Given all the analog nostalgia in pop culture lately, let us also give Posthumous praise for showing just how frustrating it can be trying to see actual details when they’re being conveyed through an old-school format. Plus, the movie’s depiction of how finicky a VCR can be, even without any evil spirits around, has an accuracy clearly drawn from real-life anguish. The tape that won’t eject, or the tape that gets hopelessly tangled in the machine—these are core annoyances for anyone who was raised before the digital age.
And we can’t end this without awarding bonus points for casting Lowe and Heelan as mother and daughter, whose uncanny resemblance helps make their family bond feel even more genuine.
Posthumous recently premiered at the 2026 Fantastic Fest; it is currently seeking distribution.
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