Fantasia Festival 2020 Film Review: The Dark and the Wicked
The Strangers’ Bryan Bertino Returns with a Different Kind of Home Invasion
Bryan Bertino’s new possession horror film, The Dark and the Wicked, is a merciless gauntlet of grief, trauma, and violence. Centered around a nerve-fraying performance by Marin Ireland, the film is rife with effective scares and blistering violence that become increasingly heavy. The Dark and the Wicked is birds of a feather with the director’s cult debut, The Strangers, and while the film takes the home invasion concept to a new place, it struggles to rekindle its predecessor’s razor-sharp tautness. Minor spoilers ahead…
At the end of director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion horror film, The Strangers, a battered and bloody Liv Tyler asks her masked tormentors: “Why are you doing this?” To which one of the interlopers responds: “Because you were home.” These four words would reverberate through the annals of cult horror history, a gruesome allegory that outlines the fact that the scariest monsters aren’t ghosts, ghouls, or demons, but human beings. Flash forward to 2020, and Bertino has given us The Dark and the Wicked, a possession horror film that aims to recapture the grim chaos and randomized violence that made The Strangers so special. And while his new story lacks the simple elegance and taut brutality of his first effort, there’s still plenty to love for fans of grueling, punishing horror.
Taking place on a remote Texas farm - the real-life Bertino ranch - The Dark and the Wicked opens with creepy tension and ambient chills: nervous goats shuffle and bray, while winds howl through the walls of the isolated property. The nameless, distraught matriarch of the family chops vegetables with little regard for her fingers, all the while taking care of her dying and comatose husband (Michael Zagst). The plot kicks into gear when the couple’s adult children, Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott, Jr.), return to say goodbye to their fading father. Unsettling atmosphere and creeping unease soon give way to sheer terror, as a malevolent presence begins dismantling the family both physically and psychologically from within.
“And while [Bertino’s] new story lacks the simple elegance and taut brutality of his first effort, there’s still plenty to love for fans of grueling, punishing horror.”
The horror set-pieces of The Dark and the Wicked are undeniably harrowing, giving us an unrelenting exercise in torment that stacks up nicely against some of its more uncomfortable genre contemporaries, but the film’s messaging remains muddled. Unlike The Strangers, by dipping into the well of the supernatural, the film doesn’t exactly work as a meditation on human nature, and the disparate pieces of the story don’t particularly gel as the exploration of grief and trauma it wants to be, either. There’s clearly a deeper mythology at play in The Dark and the Wicked - some of which involves a creepy priest played by Xander Berkley - but the scripting is much more interested in putting its audience through the wringer than constructing a cogent narrative. However, that’s not to say that the film isn’t effective: clever scares and bouts of sanguine brutality await around every corner, and with Tristan Nyby’s shadow-drenched photography, there’s ample terror and dread for the audience to chew upon. But where The Dark and the Wicked shines brightest is with Marin Ireland’s gripping performance. A portrait of a slowly unraveling psyche, Ireland gives the role her all, using her expressive face to grieve and react to her life detonating in front of her very eyes - it’s a fantastic horror performance on par with genre greats.
With its aggressive bleakness, it might require a specific mood and mindset to efficiently process The Dark and the Wicked, but there’s plenty to admire in its mastery of tone and flavor. Bryan Bertino’s latest doesn’t quite reach the coherence or clarity of his directorial debut, but it serves as another showcase for the director’s horror chops, giving us a sobering reflection of a world that can be cruel and ugly without rhyme or reason.
