In Theaters and Digital

There’s something rotten glowing beneath the neon in Matthew Ninaber’s HY3NA, and the deeper this thing crawls into its world of sex, obsession, murder, and shattered identity, the nastier the reflection staring back at us becomes. This isn’t neon slapped across a thriller because somebody watched Drive one too many goddamn times. Ninaber uses the artificial glow like contamination, bathing damaged people in colors that make everything look seductive right up until you realize there’s nothing particularly beautiful happening here.

HY3NA wants to know what happens when the person you manufacture for everyone else finally devours the person you used to be.

The film centers on Nicole (Storm Steenson), whose connection with the mysterious Rachel (Kristen Kaster) takes a particularly ugly turn after a violent car crash links the pair to a string of murders. Detectives start pulling at the threads, Nicole starts recounting what brought her into Rachel’s orbit, and HY3NA begins peeling away the boundaries between victim, accomplice, protector, predator, and something far more difficult to define. Rachel offers Nicole something intoxicating: attention, belonging, possibility, perhaps even reinvention. The price of admission, naturally, is considerably higher than advertised.

That relationship is where HY3NA has its claws deepest. Ninaber, who writes and directs, isn't particularly interested in making online sex work itself the monster. That would be easy, cheap, and frankly boring. Instead, he turns his attention toward the transaction underneath it all: the pieces of ourselves we surrender because somebody wants them, because we need money, because we're lonely, because being desired feels a hell of a lot better than being invisible. Nicole’s descent works because the choices don’t initially feel like a descent at all. One compromise becomes another, a boundary moves a couple of inches, and eventually you look backward and can’t quite see where you started.

Steenson has the difficult job of holding that psychological unraveling together, while Kaster brings Rachel the necessary combination of attraction and danger. Rachel has to make sense as someone Nicole would follow; otherwise, the entire movie collapses. Their dynamic gives the film its pulse, with Jeremy Ninaber and Matthew Ninaber rounding out a story increasingly populated by people whose motivations refuse to fit neatly into boxes marked GOOD and EVIL. That ambiguity matters because HY3NA is at its strongest when nobody seems entirely certain whether they're using somebody else or being used themselves.

Visually, Ninaber goes hard. Urban decay collides with intimate interiors, faces disappear into darkness, and those aggressive neon colors create a world that feels simultaneously artificial and painfully exposed. There’s an uncomfortable voyeuristic quality to some of it, which is obviously playing with fire considering the subject matter. Ninaber seems aware of that danger, though. HY3NA needs sexuality, violence, and exploitation in its bloodstream without becoming the exploitation it is examining. That's a tricky fucking wire to walk, and the tension between showing too much and looking away becomes part of the film's uneasiness.

It also moves. HY3NA doesn't spend two hours staring lovingly at its own symbolism while everyone waits for something to happen. The investigation provides forward momentum while Nicole's story keeps dragging us backward, gradually reframing what we've already seen and what we think we understand. The thriller machinery and psychological material feed each other, allowing the movie to have ideas without forgetting that somebody still needs to turn the damn screws.

And those ideas linger.

That's ultimately what gives Ninaber's film more bite than its stylish surface initially promises. There are murders here and plenty of genre nastiness, but the real horror isn't necessarily what one person does to another. It's how willingly we can participate in our own disappearance, one tiny compromise at a time, until the stranger in the mirror looks suspiciously like the person we thought everybody wanted.

And maybe that's the cruelest joke this film has to tell. Sometimes getting exactly what you wanted is how you lose yourself.  HY3NA will have its World premiere at Tubi FrightFest London on August 31st

MPAA Rating: Unrated
Runtime: 88 mins
Director: Matthew Ninaber
Writer: Jannah Kitzman; Matthew Ninaber
Cast: Kristen Kaster; Storm Steenson; Jeremy Ninaber
Genre: Mystery | Crime
Tagline: Love Gets Messy
Memorable Movie Quote: "
Distributor: High Rise Studio
Official Site:
Release Date: August 31, 20206
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: Two Detectives work tirelessly to track down a serial killer targeting patrons of an online sex worker. After a gruesome car crash with two dead bodies, an ex-lover and a Jane doe, they finally have their first suspects. Nicole and Rachel. With the help of the detectives, Nicole uncovers life before and after being drawn into an online web of sex and money. Where, under the influence of the enigmatic Rachel, her life quickly took a sinister turn. Racing against time, the detectives must protect Nicole and unravel the identity of the serial killer. While confronting their own demons.