Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), a grieving cellist who recently lost her husband, drags her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim) and mother-in-law Nai Nai (Fiona Fu) to a new house in Rock Springs to start fresh. But their arrival in the small Wyoming town comes with all sorts of strange omens: Nai Nai warns her about the consequences of moving before her husband’s spirit has finished his business on earth; Gracie seems to have picked up a strange imaginary friend in the woods; and Emily keeps imagining that she sees her husband’s ghost.
But Rock Springs, an atmospheric new horror movie written and directed by Vera Miao, takes this ghost story one step further, cutting to the late 19th century, when a group of Chinese miners living and working in Rock Springs was brutally massacred by disgruntled white miners. Soon, it becomes clear that the lingering cultural grief of this historic atrocity has started to haunt Emily and her family in real and malicious ways. It’s all a tangle of grief, trauma, and history that Miao wanted to explore in her search to really capture “diaspora through horror.”
