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There is something deeply rude about a horror movie where the game refuses to stay in the game. Jitters takes that cursed media anxiety and drags it into a British detective thriller, where one supposedly natural death leads to trauma, technology, and a very bad time online.
Written by George Willcox and directed and produced by Marc Zammit, who previously made Witch, Jitters is available now on digital and arrived on Blu-ray on 18 May 2026 from Reel2Reel Films and 101 Films. It stars Fabrizio Santino as Detective Collymore, a single father with a complicated relationship with his own failings, which in this kind of story means the case was always going to get personal.
The setup is procedural on the surface. A young woman has died. The official ruling is natural causes. Collymore does not buy it, which is either good instincts or a compulsion toward the kind of case that ruins careers, and Jitters turns out to be interested in both possibilities. The investigation pulls him toward the darker corners of the internet and eventually toward Jitters, an underground simulation game that the film treats less as a puzzle to be solved and more as a trap that keeps widening. To survive and pull his family back from whatever the case has dragged them toward, Collymore has to face what is coded into the game and what was already there inside him before the game began.
That is a lot of emotional freight for a modestly budgeted British thriller. Most of the time, Jitters carries it.
A Detective Worth Following
The film’s clearest asset is Santino, whose Collymore is exactly the anchoring presence this material needs. The cursed media subgenre lives or dies on whether you believe the person investigating, and Santino sells the weariness and the compulsion in equal measure. His credits include Captain America: The First Avenger and a run on Hollyoaks, which is a range that turns out to serve the role usefully. He can hold a scene without leaning on it.
Anto Sharp’s Detective Harding gives Collymore a counterweight, and Daniel Jordan as the film’s titular entity functions as something Jitters is careful not to over explain, at least for most of its runtime. The supporting cast, including Boo Miller, Jess Impiazzi, Lauren Budd, Richard Wisker, Ritchi Edwards, and Chloe Hews, fills in the world without crowding it.
Logged In, Can’t Get Out
What Jitters is actually interested in is not the mechanics of the game but the feeling of the game. The specific dread of a digital space that has found something out about you. The underground internet as a place where the visible world’s rules stop applying. This puts it in decent company alongside Unfriended, the Pulse tradition, and anything in the cursed media lineage that takes seriously the idea that a screen can haunt you.
Zammit, directing his second feature, treats the internet less as a location and more as a condition. You do not visit it in this film so much as it accumulates around you. The anxiety is less about what the game does and more about what it reveals, which is a smarter approach than the subgenre usually manages. It also connects the technology horror to the trauma horror with enough consistency that the two threads feel like one story rather than two films that got accidentally edited together.
The modern horror resonances are doing genuine work here. The dark web as a space where obsession and investigation become the same thing. The cursed game as a metaphor for grief that keeps finding you in new places. The realization that whatever Collymore is looking for online might be looking back. For a film made on a limited budget, the thematic ambition is real and mostly earned.
Built on a Budget, Aimed High
Jitters is an indie film and does not always hide it. The pacing in the middle sections is more procedural than propulsive, and viewers arriving from the jump scare end of the genre may find themselves waiting for a gear shift that arrives later than expected. The film is a thriller first and a horror film second, which is a choice that shapes the rhythm of the whole thing. If you go in expecting relentless scares, you may go in expecting the wrong film.
The ambition is real. The resources are limited. The film is working with what it has and generally making that work, though the gap between concept and execution is occasionally visible in the way that British indie horror sometimes unavoidably shows its seams.
Co-produced by James Fuller and Richard Oakes alongside Zammit, the production is lean in the way that the best British independent horror often is, which can read as atmosphere or limitation depending on your tolerance for that register. I come down on the side of atmosphere, for the most part. Jitters earns its slower passages by making Collymore’s situation feel genuinely precarious rather than procedurally inevitable. When the film is working, it is working as anxiety rather than as action, and that is a harder thing to pull off than it sounds.
Nerdly called it “a really cool horror movie.” Starburst called it a thriller that punches above its budget. Neither of those assessments is wrong. For a small British genre film navigating cursed media, dark web paranoia, and a detective story with genuine emotional stakes, landing in both of those places simultaneously is a reasonable result.
Jitters may not be the loudest horror release of the year, but it has the kind of premise that gets under your skin because it feels uncomfortably close to the world we already live in. For fans of cursed media, British indie horror, and thrillers where trauma and technology keep feeding each other, this one is worth booting up.
