[PANIC FEST 2026] 'BABYBACKS' IS A GRISLY STANDOUT

By Katelyn Nelson

April 25, 2026

Sponsored by

Film festival season is one of my favorite times of year. They’re always a perfect capsule to showcase some of the best talent of the moment, and some of film’s most unique and diverse voices. 2026’s Panic Film Festival delivers on both fronts in spades.

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One standout example is writer-director Geno Marx’s BABYBACKS. This prescient tale follows Zoe (Viridiana Marquez) and Mateo (Ryan Rathbun) as they cross the US-Mexican border on the run from the cartel. They seek refuge with a strange but migrant-sympathetic couple just north of the border, and soon realize they may be in more danger than ever. The couple, Wayne (Peter Lucas) and Carol (Melissa Chambers) are so immediately off-putting that the stakes are set within their first few seconds on screen. We, and Zoe, can tell in a breath that every interaction with these self-proclaimed sympathizers is laced with more danger than most of us would ever know how to handle. Every look highlights the fact that the couple’s sanity is held together with little more than spider silk in a wind storm. But when you’re caught between two life or death scenarios, survival is all about the strategic choice.

Part of what makes BABYBACKS so impressive is its ability to both maintain and consistently ratchet up the tension in a scenario that seems at once all too plausible and remarkably outlandish. It feels the same cocktail of dangerous and near ridiculous as something like Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Another of its strengths is its confidence. BABYBACKS is not afraid to lay everything out on the table for you essentially from the jump and leave you to reckon with its depravity. As such, it is viscerally uncomfortable for its entire runtime.

Geno Marx trusts the viewer to be confronted with this level of insanity and sit with it even as it pushes the envelope further and further along. The beats may not be anything revolutionary, but they are effectively put to use, and Peter Lucas and Melissa Chambers are effortlessly monstrous. It is Viridiana Marquez’s turn as Zoe, however, that makes the film. We feel through even the smallest of her actions a woman who has spent her whole life facing unfathomable fear with courage. Even in moments when the film tries to release the pressure valve with some—albeit still grisly—humor, we’re with Zoe in her determination to escape and survive a world that wants to grind her down and make her palatable from multiple angles. And we cheer at every turn she makes them choke.

BABYBACKS feels like a film of the moment, in a way, and I can’t wait for its surely inevitable wider release.

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