The Dark and the Wicked (2020)

Directed by: Bryan Bertino | 95 minutes | horror, thriller | Actors: Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., Julie Oliver-Touchstone, Lynn Andrews, Tom Nowicki, Michael Zagst, Xander Berkeley, Charles Jonathan Trott, Ella Ballentine, Mel Cowan, Mindy Raymond, Chris Doubek

On a remote sheep farm, deep in rural Texas, an old man is dying. Bound to his bed and fighting for his last breath, he causes great grief to his wife, who seems to be succumbing to the situation. When their grown children, Louise and Michael, return home to say goodbye to their father, the pair find that their mother is overcome with more than just grief. A gray veil hangs over the family home, a darkness that creates terrifying moments and turns the family’s already difficult grieving process into a horrific nightmare.

It’s something most of us are going to experience or have already gone through: the inevitable death of our parents. An already drastic event, which becomes even more painful if the dying process is slow and you have to watch it closely. Sometimes the shared sorrow leads to rapprochement between the children, in other cases the sorrow exacerbates existing tensions between the family members left behind. In ‘The Dark and the Wicked’ there is an extra complicating factor: a mysterious evil that seems to physically consume the critically ill father and slowly drives the rest of the family towards madness.

‘The Dark and the Wicked’ is a horror movie that does many things well. The creepy and ominous soundtrack, the sometimes hallucinatory images and a healthy dose of gore at the right moments (eating carrots will never be the same after this film if you have a weak stomach) link a dark atmosphere drawing to a number of effective scare moments. The acting isn’t bad either. Marin Ireland, in particular, is on a roll and confidently portrays a woman who unites vulnerability and moments of tenderness with sometimes steel-hard coolness. Her decrepit face bears witness to the terror and guilt (the contact with her parents and brother is not too close) that Louise begins to consume more and more as the film progresses.

The only downside is that ‘The Dark and the Wicked’ lacks a strong story that ties up certain loose ends. Some parts of the film mainly look like a series of standalone ‘jump scares’; you sometimes miss the story-technical glue that connects them. On the one hand, it’s good that the film doesn’t explain too much. There are already too many horror movies that do that too explicitly, often at the expense of the tension. But a little more clarification would have been welcome. Between the lines, we understand that brother and sister hardly see or speak to each other outside the tragedy of the current family situation, while both children clearly do not walk the doorstep with their parents. A brief reference to the how and why of this situation would have been welcome.

Visually, director Bryan Bertino has his affairs in order. With interesting and unusual camera angles, he manages to create the atmosphere that a film of this type needs. Moreover, the effects are solid and are used sparingly enough to generate actual impact. The slow pace of the film is an advantage in this case and makes the process of physical and/or mental degeneration that the protagonists go through believable, convincing and tangible.

The Final Verdict: While ‘The Dark and the Wicked’ isn’t perfect, it’s a dark and bleak psychological horror film that is clearly above the genre average. An ideal film for a rainy autumn or winter evening when the wind howls audibly over the roofs.