THE DARK AND THE WICKED (April 2020)

THE DARK AND THE WICKED

(April 2020)

“She would sit... right beside him, just whispering. But she wasn’t talking to him. Not like she used to. It was like… there was someone else. Someone here.”

Bryan Bertino is back ‘round these parts with the upsetting, emotionally wrenching dirge that is The Dark and the Wicked.

The rural horror film sees the Straker siblings return to their family farm in Thurber, Texas, where their mother lives with their bedridden (and rapidly deteriorating) father.

Louise (Marin Ireland; The Umbrella Academy Season 2) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) intend to stay for a few days, to help, perhaps to lend emotional support, in what looks, in all likelihood, to be their final farewell to their father.

But it’s clear their mother (Preacher’s Gran’Ma, Julie Oliver-Touchstone) doesn’t want them there. She says as much.

With Bertino at the helm, you can be damned certain there’s a good reason for that…

“What does it matter whether you believe? You think the wolf cares if you believe he’s a wolf? Hmmm? Not if he finds you alone in the woods.”

Anyone who’s seen Bertino’s The Strangers* knows his complete, stranglehold control over onscreen tension, and that masterly deathgrip is plainly evident here as well, so much so that painfully ordinary domestic fixtures (a light switch, a telephone) become objects of dread and revulsion.

But that’s really only just the entrée.

‘Cause the main course is the full-on assault by wicked and unholy powers on the bonds of family and love.

Decide for yourself if this is a meal you want to partake of…

“Devil, devil, devil.”

* Landing on the ¡Qué horror! 2008 list, there’s a review of The Strangers here.

Meanwhile, Bertino’s third directorial effort, The Monster, crashed onto the 2017 rundown.

And, for completion’s sake (and because if you haven’t seen it, you most definitely should), Osgood Perkins’ The Blackcoat’s Daughter (on which Bertino was a producer), likewise made a spot for itself on the 2016 rundown.

(The Dark and the Wicked OS courtesy of impawards.com.)