[Fantasia 2020 Review] The Dark and the Wicked is One of the Bleakest Films I've Seen

Bryan Bertino burst on the scene in 2008 with The Strangers, a film that mixed home invasion and slasher tropes with brutal honesty and nihilism. From that striking film, Bertino’s filmography continues to explore themes of family and crushing despair. He seems to delight in putting a crumbling family together with something truly monstrous to watch the pieces crumble. It’s a callous and pessimistic worldview that I happen to enjoy in horror films. The bleaker, the better...and it’s with that mindset that I entered Bertino’s latest film and it still somehow surprised me. 

The Dark and the Wicked is a masterpiece of slow-burn tension and spiraling desolation.

From the establishing shots, Bertino is at the top of his game as he focuses on a rural farm in Texas, preparing for the evening. The goats are tended in their barn, a makeshift chain of alarms made of beer bottles and horseshoes separating them from the outside world. In a totally not creepy sewing room filled with mannequins and illuminated with only a hint of light, an old woman named only Mother (Jule Oliver-Touchstone) whisper-sings a haunting melody while sewing. She goes to check on her ailing husband known only as Father (Michael Zagst), who’s being kept alive on a respirator when she hears the howling of wolves. Except through the cacophony of clanging horseshoes, beer bottles and panicked goat screams, we see a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight of something hiding amongst the goats. 

And whatever it is...it ain’t a wolf. 

The next day, Mother and Father’s two adult kids Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) show and it’s obvious the family dynamics are strained. Bertino’s script keeps the details out of sight and all we know is that Michael is married and has children. It’s evident from the first moments of their arrival that their mother does not want them there and she is downright hostile towards them. “Told you not to come,” she spats at Louise. “I forbade you. You both know it. You never listen to me...go home!” 

But both Michael and Louise see how physically exhausted their mother is from trying to keep the farm going while their father slowly dies in his bedroom. The relationship between Michael and Louise is likewise strained. Their distance is obliquely mentioned when Michael talks about his daughter’s birthday and Louise apologizes for not calling.  

An oppressive feeling of regret hangs over the family and the two siblings seem to realize that they are too late to solve anything. They talk about their mother’s future, post father’s death, by saying things like “we can’t leave her alone out here.” And they forlornly punish themselves by saying they should have done something. It’s a suffocating refrain that carries into the first act of violence when the siblings leave their mother in the kitchen to chop carrots. In a scene that feels like a horrific and deadly serious mirror to one in The Color Out of Space, something stirs behind Mother and her chopping picks up speed until she’s chopping her fingers into bite-sized pieces. 

Then she hangs herself in the barn. 

The thing is, this event that ends the first act is probably the least upsetting moment of The Dark and the Wicked. The Mother’s death becomes a catalyst, forcing the kids to stay to take care of their father and the family farm until he breathes his last breath. Her once insistent and forceful rebukes becomes a mother’s dying wish to spare her children from the horrors she’s dealt with. As we follow the siblings trying to tend the farm and deal with their mother’s death, the true evil lying in wait for the family slowly and imperceptibly arises.

Moments like this recall the themes and tone of The Strangers. Like in that film, The Dark and the Wicked is unnervingly quiet. Even the characters talk in low, breathless desperation, their southern drawl slowly and quietly falling off their tongues. The silence lulls you into thinking you’re watching a family drama before delivering moments of abject terror. The creature haunting the family takes pleasure in torturing its victims, using their mother’s voice to remind them, “Told y’all not to come” on the phone or disorienting them by playing with the lights or with twisted images of people they know. It’s an insidious, invisible foe that delights in slowly whittling away at their sanity, breaking them down, scene after scene. 

Bertino knows how to craft a scene and mostly uses the scares as a subtle, background horror. His ability to slowly build a sense of quiet desperation might be unmatched today but its the rumination on the all-too-real feelings of regret that linger. This is the kind of slow burn horror at its greatest; a snake slowly constricting around the remains of the family, crushing all hope in its implacable grasp. This is when The Dark and the Wicked is at its best. When it dips into the typical supernatural moments, like a stop-motion-like woman taking a knife to her body, it doesn’t succeed as well and actually took me out of the oppressive feeling the film was otherwise exploring. 

But those aren’t the moments that I’ll be thinking about, weeks to come. It’ll be the way a woman screams about her dying father. The furtive feeling of a family on the verge of imploding. The unspoken words and actions, however minuscule that haunt the characters like regret over not hugging their mother or being with her in her final moments that really hit home as an adult child with aging parents. That feeling of having to face the mortality of your parents you grew up thinking would live forever. And the regrets that linger after they pass. 

And while The Dark and the Wicked grapples with a disintegrating family in ways similar to The Strangers, it ultimately feels even bleaker. A home invasion of a different sort. One that swaps a burlap sack for an even more desolate creature. The kind that creeps in with the shadows. 

And lingers.