Rock Springs, Vera Miao’s first film as a director, stars Kelly Marie Tran and Benedict Wong. It premiered in the Midnight section of Sundance 2026 and mixes family trauma with the real-life horrors of the 1885 Rock Springs massacre. This spooky ghost story is about a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother who move to a creepy town in Wyoming after the girl’s father dies. There, they find terrible secrets in the woods and the town’s violent past.
The story doesn’t follow a straight line; it jumps back and forth between present-day hauntings and flashbacks to the massacre, when Chinese miners were brutally persecuted. This gives the story an unsettling historical resonance. Critics like how it makes people think by using real events, but some say the third act’s structure can be hard to follow.
Kelly Marie Tran gives a great performance as the grieving widow who keeps her family together, and Benedict Wong’s role as a miner in the flashbacks adds a lot of emotional weight. This diaspora ghost story gets more interesting with the help of actors like Jimmy O. Yang, Aria Kim, and Fiona Fu.
Reviews call Rock Springs a strong psychological thriller with genre potential. It uses trauma-horror tropes but does a great job with historical flashbacks, which will probably make it popular with distributors after Sundance. Miao’s first movie is a must-see for horror fans because of its daring storytelling.
