In any ensemble horror film, there are a couple of ways that things can go - if the protagonists are sympathetic, they’ll generally band together and resist the evil preying on them, because looking out for your fellow human being is a sympathetic trait. You’ve also got the ones where the protagonists are basically selfish, obnoxious jerks who get picked off one by one. Personally, I don’t really think of the latter situation as horror, because there’s not much scary about cheering on the deaths of people you don’t like. Given the evergreen popularity of slasher films, I might be alone in that estimation.
But anyway, lately I’ve been really enjoying films that take people who are generally sympathetic and put them in a situation where they fail to come together, and everything goes bad as a result. Maybe they’re overmatched, maybe they’re deeply flawed, but even though they aren’t bad people, they just don’t or can’t get it together when it matters. Films like Hereditary, Green Room, The VVitch, and now The Dark And The Wicked, a creepy, atmospheric film about how a family’s inability to communicate or connect in the face of a tragedy allows evil to infect their lives and destroy them from the inside out
We open on a farm somewhere in rural Texas. It’s dark outside, not late-night dark, but early, early morning dark. This is a working farm. They raise sheep and goats, and chores start early. An old man lies in bed, hooked up to oxygen, unmoving. An old woman, careworn, works in the kitchen, softly singing a hymn under her breath. The house is modest, maybe even shabby. It’s quiet and still.
Until something unseen creaks a door open. Scrapes a chair across the floor. The old woman holds her breath, clamps her eyes shut, and wills herself not to look.
This is the Straker family farm, and siblings Louise and Michael have come home to look after their parents. Their father is gravely ill and wishes to die at home. Their mother has some help from their farmhand Charlie, but she’s trying to do far too much on her own. So, Louise and Michael have come home to say goodbye to their father and hopefully lighten their mother’s burden. You get the sense that it’s been a long time since the whole family was together. The siblings are worried about their mother - she seems overworked, run ragged, but that’s to be expected when she’s trying to keep a farm going and attend to her dying husband. She also seems…haunted. Afraid of something out there in the dark somewhere. But she doesn’t want to talk about it.
She doesn’t want to talk about the thing that comes in the night and whispers to her.
This is a film that relies on atmosphere above all else. It’s a dark (thematically and visually) film with a drab palette - all of the color has been drained from this film, and the interiors are largely swallowed up by shadow, even during the daytime. It does a lot of work with silence that hangs in the air so that any interruption is startling. Doors open and lights switch on by themselves, the floorboards creak when there’s nobody walking across them. A wolf howls somewhere in the distance. As the film progresses, there are apparitions, visions, nightmare sequences that expertly punctuate the stillness. A couple of sequences verge on jump scares, but not so much that it becomes annoying, as jump scares often do. It’s as much about framing and pacing as anything else. The result is that a pall of dread falls over the film very quickly. It’s clear something isn’t right here, and that it isn’t going to get better on its own.
This emphasis on silence extends to the people in the film as well. There’s very little dialogue, and most of it is halting and elliptical. These aren’t people who talk a lot, and you get the sense that there’s pain in this house. Neither Louise nor Michael have been home in a long, long time, and they all haven’t been very good about keeping in touch. Michael’s got a family of his own, and Louise seems to be going through a rough patch. There’s definite guilt at how things have turned out, and you never get the sense that these people hate each other, but there is a bit of the feeling that this all too little, too late, that whatever damage has been done to this family is finally irreparable. Even now, in the face of tragedy, their mother doesn’t want to tell them what’s going on, doesn’t want to tell them why she told them not to come. It doesn’t seem unusual to Louise and Michael, they expect their mother not to make a fuss, to refuse help. This is a family that at their bedrock doesn’t talk about things, even things that bother them greatly.
There isn’t a lot of character development, but people largely act like people - for as uncommunicative as they are, Louise and Michael are at least honest with each other where and when it matters, and when things start to get really strange, their thoughts turn not to how to defeat the evil that’s consuming their family whole, but how this is a bad scene and they should probably get out of there, complicated by their feelings for their parents. There’s also a refreshing lack of explanation for everything that’s happening. No serendipitously discovered ancient tome, no experts on hand to tell Louise and Michael what they need to do, no names, no origin stories, no history of ancient rituals. There’s something out there in the dark, and it’s also in there with them, and it’s feeding on all of them. Even a diary provides nothing but a litany of hopelessness and fear, and the overall feeling is that the die has been cast, and everyone is helpless in the face of something malevolent that is toying with them, torturing them, confident in its final victory. The word I keep seeing used to describe the film is “bleak,” and I have to say, it’s about right. There’s very little light in this film, and terrible things happen in the light too.
There are a few false notes. Not many, but noticeable by contrast in a film otherwise made with so much skill and attention to detail. The music is mostly tasteful strings and ambience, but gets overheated in a couple of spots, underlining the action a little too obviously. This is especially noticeable in a film that relies so much on silence and stillness and small details doing a lot of the work. One sequence falls a little into cliché, another feels less sinister than confusing, and toward the end we become so accustomed to things not being what they appear to be that one particular scene falls a little flat because you can sort of see it coming. But these are really small problems, as much about how nitpicky I get when a film is good as anything else. The overwhelming majority of this film is executed with a taste and restraint that modern horror films (at least in the U.S.) eschew as often as not, but without sacrificing any unease. In its unrelenting grimness and oppressive rural setting, it reminds me a lot of
The Abandoned, and it’s one of the few films I’ve seen lately that actually made me gasp out loud more than once.
And if the damage done to this family’s relationship to each other is irreparable, then their fates are equally inexorable. The evil is already here, it’s already found its way in, there’s nothing to keep out. Evil finds its way in through the cracks in our ties to each other, it goes where love isn’t and spreads like a cancer from one person to another. It divides and conquers, and its triumph is absolute. Maybe this could have been avoided, maybe not, but it’s too late now, and it leaves you with an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach when the film ends.
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