Residually unsettling "The Dark and the Wicked" lives up to its title

The Dark and the Wicked (2020)

When writer-director Bryan Bertino (2016’s “The Monster”) titled his latest horror film “The Dark and the Wicked,” he wasn’t kidding. Best known for his 2008 directorial debut, the knife-cuttingly harrowing home-invasion suspenser “The Strangers,” Bertino once again knows how to keep a viewer up at night and make us feel less than safe in our own homes. His films don’t usually have a pleasant outlook, and this one is a dread-inducing death rattle with a cloven hoof in film form. Exchanging three masked maniacs at the door for a different kind of malice, like the prince of darkness himself, “The Dark and the Wicked” shreds one’s nerves until they are frazzled and raw.

Distant adult siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) return to their remote Texas farmhouse when they get the call that their father (Michael Zagst) is on his deathbed. Their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) actually warned them not to come, but they want to say goodbye. When they arrive, Mom is acting strangely beyond the sorrow of slowly waiting for her other half to take his last breath. Their father’s hired nurse (Lynn Andrews) even alerts them that their mother has been sitting bedside talking to someone who isn’t really there. When Mom told them to stay away, they should have listened because they are more safe dead than alive as evil incarnate envelops the family.

“The Dark and the Wicked” is residually unsettling horror boiled down to its purest essence with the trembling feeling that something truly dreadful is waiting in the darkness. Here is a gutting down-home horror story about the faithless ties that bind, the children being the parents, and the doom of becoming one’s parents. Bryan Bertino brings such an assured hand to each frame, relying on the pastoral lonesomeness, the howls at night, and the simple clanging of empty bottles on a line that alerts a presence in the family’s barn with the goats. The tingly air of unease begins to eat away at the viewer’s comfort level and only cranks up once Michael has an unnerving night terror. This will also be the third film this year—the other two being “The Grudge” and “Color Out of Space”—involving a teeth-grittingly tense chopping of carrots that ends terribly. Bertino’s scares are sometimes understated without having to be underscored by instrumental stingers. Even when composer Tom Schrader’s creepy score gives an assist, the sinister dread is already brewing into hopelessness. 

Despite a rather abrupt conclusion—which, come to think of it, isn’t dissimilar from the very last scare at the end of “The Strangers”—“The Dark and the Wicked” lives up to its title, steamrolling all light and glimmer of hope. One wishes a little more was learned about Louise, but Marin Ireland (2019’s “The Irishman”) is so rawly vulnerable that she provides pretty much all that is necessary about a character who slowly has everything taken from her. As brother Michael, Michael Abbott Jr. (2019’s “The Death of Dick Long”) matches Ireland in his conveying of mourning and the deterioration of his courage and spirit by the presence felt and seen in the house. When Michael can no longer handle the familial stress, his fate has already been sealed and the doom follows him home, lending credence to why the characters can’t just leave the old homestead. Longtime character actor Xander Berkeley, a priest who claims to be a friend to Louise and Michael’s mother, also makes a lingering impression as a possible wolf in sheep’s clothing. Mercilessly and oppressively grim, “The Dark and the Wicked” is one of those rare films that has the power to actually chill you to the bone. Buckle the hell up.

Grade: A -

RLJE Films will release “The Dark and the Wicked” (94 min.) In Theaters, On Digital and On Demand November 6, 2020.