The Dark and the Wicked came out a few years ago and while it has been in my queue for a while, I only just got around to watching it. It seemed like one of those movies that I needed to be ready for—not one to just randomly watch whenever.
I feel like that was the right decision.
Michael and Louise are adult siblings who have returned to their parents’ farm in rural Texas, where their mother has been caring for their ailing father, who is bedridden and seems to be in a coma. It soon becomes clear that Something Evil is there as well.
(Spoilers from here onwards, so consider yourself warned…)
What I am about to say is going to sound like a complaint but it is actually a compliment. After watching The Dark and the Wicked, I was surprised to discover that is just barely more than ninety minutes long. It felt much longer than that, but not because it was tedious. Rather, it was dreadful (i.e., laden with dread) and harrowing for nearly the entire runtime.
My interpretation of the film’s title is that something wicked is at work, and it comes for you in the dark. The movie is divided up by title cards marking the days—Monday through Sunday—and all of the terrifying stuff happens at night. This rhythm gives the story a feeling of relentlessness; I found myself thinking of Newt’s “They mostly come at night” warning, although here it is entirely rather than mostly, and it is just one thing. And it gets worse and worse. I think it was when the “Wednesday” title card popped up that I actually laughed out loud, thinking “Christ, it’s only WEDNESDAY?” The nights on the farm are awful—tense and terrifying—and I felt physically and mentally relieved every time day rolled around again.
I am not a huge fan of gore and jump scares when they are deployed willy-nilly but I do think both can be used to good effect in horror movies. This movie does a good job of that. There is one scene—and it is fairly early on, too—of gore that I found particularly awful but otherwise the film is relatively judicious in this regard. Same with the jump-scares.
What is positively dripping from every scene, however, is a palpable sense of menace. It is clear from the start that something terrible has come to this farm and the family that lives there, and it feels like they cannot escape it. What I found particularly impressive is that while the movie is not super-claustrophobic—it takes place almost entirely on the farm, but it feels like an open space—I felt like I was trapped there with the characters and the evil was coming for me too.
A trend I do not like in a lot of contemporary horror movies—especially “prestige” horror—is overt, pound-me-over-the-head assertions of horror as a metaphor for human emotional trauma. Hereditary is the poster child for this sort of thing, and it sucks. I appreciated that while The Dark and the Wicked clearly has a lot of thoughts about families, alienation, communication (and the lack thereof), and the nature of evil, it does not outright say them. They are all there—often just beneath the surface—but it leaves a lot of space for the audience to make up its own mind.
It is, of course, not a perfect movie. A lot of the unpleasantness could have been avoided had the characters been better able to talk to one another and I often found myself thinking “JUST SAY WHAT YOU’RE FEELING!”
Through its back half, I think the film struggles a bit to maintain the level of menace and dread it builds through through first half. The filmmakers have to keep coming up with more and more scares for both the characters and the audience and it ends up being somewhat inconsistent. The same demon(?) that is driving characters to chop off their fingers and stab out their eyes is also making prank phone calls and flipping the lights on and off. It is scary in the moment but does not make much sense.
Overall, though, The Dark and the Wicked is a very good horror movie, and not one for the faint of heart. The atmosphere is fantastic, as are the performances. Find yourself a dark evening and a good surround-sound system, and you’re in for an unsettling, harrowing, often terrifying ninety minutes that will leave you with a lot to think about.