Here's the thing about high-concept horror: the concept is usually the easy part. The hard part is not tripping over it for 90 minutes. Okumura knows this, and she keeps The Last Kiss moving at a clip that never lets you stop and ask the obvious questions - like why nobody just, you know, stops kissing people. By the time that thought arrives, you're already three scenes deep into somebody else's gruesome fate.
Mckenna Grace is the engine here, and she's terrific in a role that demands she play grief, terror, and teenage awkwardness all at once. Laurel isn't a scream queen - she's a kid forced into being a witness, and Grace sells the exhaustion of someone who keeps seeing the worst thing imaginable and can't look away. The chemistry with Jaden Michael's Evan Geller gives the movie a heartbeat underneath all the blood, which matters when your premise is essentially "romance equals doom."
The mystery itself is sturdy, if not exactly airtight. Okumura stages the kills with real nastiness - there's one sequence involving a forest ranger (Samantha Espie) that had my whole theater audibly recoiling - and the killer's identity lands with a satisfying thud. The script doesn't cheat, but it does fudge a couple of timeline details to keep the red herrings swimming. That's a fair trade in a movie this fun.
Where it stumbles is in the final stretch, when the exposition arrives in a lump and the curse rules get a little fuzzy. You'll walk out with a couple of "wait, but what about - " questions, and the movie knows it, rushing past them with a final scare that mostly works. Still, this is the kind of genre filmmaking that respects its audience's time and intelligence. In a fall season stuffed with bloated horror sequels, a tight 97 minutes of curse-driven chaos feels like a gift.
