Venom: Let There Be Carnage

A Love Story with Teeth

If you squint through the digital sludge and the cacophony of screeching alien frequencies, *Venom: Let There Be Carnage* reveals itself not as a superhero movie, but as the year’s most chaotic, heartfelt romantic comedy. While the Marvel Cinematic Universe often operates with the precision of a military exercise, calculated to offend no one and please everyone, director Andy Serkis’s sequel is a gloriously messy, intimate affair. It cares less about saving the world and more about whether two dysfunctional roommates—one a sweaty, neurotic journalist, the other a brain-eating space amoeba—can make their lease work.

Serkis, a filmmaker who has spent his career humanizing the inhuman (from Gollum to Caesar), brings a distinct tactile sensibility to the film. Under his direction, the visual language is claustrophobic and kinetic. The camera rarely pulls back to admire the skyline; instead, it crowds Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) in his grime-streaked apartment, mirroring the suffocation of sharing your body with a lethal parasite. When the action inevitably explodes into CGI mayhem, it can admittedly dissolve into a blur of red and black tendrils—a visual soup that occasionally confuses the eye. Yet, Serkis understands that the spectacle is secondary to the physical comedy of Tom Hardy throwing himself around a room, fighting a battle that is entirely internal.

The film’s "heart" is surprisingly literal. The central conflict is not really about the villainous Cletus Kasady (played with wide-eyed, hillbilly menace by Woody Harrelson), but about the domestic dispute between Eddie and Venom. The script, co-written by Hardy himself, treats their bond with the beats of a screwball comedy. They bicker over chickens, they have a "breakup" scene that involves throwing possessions out the window, and they suffer the pangs of separation. The now-famous rave scene, where Venom adorns himself in glow sticks and delivers a speech about acceptance to a cheering crowd, is hardly subtle in its queer coding, but it effectively underscores the film’s core theme: the agony of the closet versus the liberation of the self.

Kasady and his symbiote, Carnage, serve as the dark reflection of this relationship. While Eddie and Venom are a bickering old married couple working toward symbiosis, Cletus and Carnage are a toxic union born of hate and devoid of compromise. Their bond is powerful but brittle, lacking the messy, human empathy that tethers Eddie to his alien other.

Ultimately, *Let There Be Carnage* succeeds where many polished blockbusters fail because it refuses to take its own stakes seriously, yet takes its characters’ emotions *very* seriously. It is a film that understands that intimacy is a form of parasitism—we consume each other, we change each other, and sometimes, we threaten to bite each other’s heads off. In an era of sanitized corporate cinema, there is something weirdly refreshing about a movie that is just a story about a man and his slime trying to find a common rhythm in a chaotic world.