Different types of thrills are waiting for you at South African cinemas this week, as three new movies bring the exhilaration. If that’s all a bit much for you, though, and you crave something more highbrow, perhaps recordings of opera El Último Sueño De Frida Y Diego or theatre production A Streetcar Named Desire (with Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby, and Ben Foster), will lure you out the house.
It may be only May, but there’s a very good chance that Backrooms will be the biggest horror hit of 2026, exploring as it does the creepypasta concept of liminal, extradimensional spaces that can be accidentally accessed from our reality. A24 has empowered young filmmaker Kane Parsons to transform his smash-hit Backrooms web series into a feature film, and the result centres on a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who sets out to discover what happened to her patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a man who disappeared after insisting that there’s a whole other world in his furniture store.
As popular as they are on the small screen, shark attack movies rarely swim into cinemas. Which makes survival thriller Deep Water something to put on your radar if you love big bitey fish. Deep Blue Sea’s Renny Harlin directs this story of a passenger jet that crashes in the Pacific during a routine flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. But that’s only the start of the nightmare for survivors, as they realise sharks are circling their sinking wreckage. Adding some prestige to the cast are are Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, playing the pilots forced into a leadership role post incident.
The latest breezy crime actioner from Snatch, The Gentlemen and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’s Guy Ritchie is In The Grey. Pretty people Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal and Eiza González lead the cast of this heist tale, where a covert team of operatives are hired to retrieve a billion-dollar fortune owed to an asset management firm by a ruthless billionaire. An already dangerous campaign of sabotage, bribery, and subterfuge soon spirals into all-out warfare as the billionaire mobilises his private army. Watch this one at Ster Kinekor cinemas only.