THE DARK AND THE WICKED | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Bryan Bertino (15, 96 mins)
Unsettling slow-burn horror that, like director Bryan Bertino’s earlier film The Strangers, makes the most of creating an atmosphere of dread. Lots of slow panning, wide-open vistas and glacial camera movements where a sparse kitchen can run fear down your spine. Lights turning on in the room are petrifying and the claustrophobic sense of unease is difficult to shake off.
Brother and sister Louise and Michael, played by Marin Ireland and Michael Abbot Jnr, return home to their family farm in rural Texas as their bedridden father apparently nears his final days. He’s being cared for by their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) but the weight of numbing grief and something else is starting to weigh heavily upon her. Their animals are disturbed, there is a clanging through the bottles and chains around their property and a sense of encroaching evil.
The siblings find their mother’s diary, full of fear of the devil and worries about souls, and a stash of crucifixes – which baffles them, as their parents are far from religious. Events grow grimmer and more disturbing as their mother deteriorates, cutting carrots then fingers, and the children are left to defend their father from something horridly inevitable. Writer/director Bertino conjures a genuinely horrifying tale with a pitiless, taut relentlessness.
Nightmarish visions intrude in the daytime and people appear who may or may not be real, including neighbours: Xander Berkeley’s creepy reverend and beleaguered nurse Lynn Andrews. Bertino offers up a meditation on guilt, fear and the nature of family, the inevitability of death being out of your hands and the anxieties of life in general. Michael worries about leaving his wife and kids to visit home, while his sister has no real ties. The Dark And The Wicked is a strong, resonant and very scary film that should be watched with lights on… so long as you turned the lights on.
On Shudder from Thurs 25 Feb. Info: here
words KEIRON SELF