Review: The Dark and the Wicked Is an Impressively Sustained Freak-Out

Evil is a force implicitly summoned by personal dysfunction in Bryan Bertino’s films, whether it’s the failed marriage proposal of The Strangers or a mother’s alcoholism in The Monster. This preoccupation aligns Bertino with another rising American horror auteur, Mike Flanagan, though the former is growing more ruthless and austere with each production while the latter’s recent output is mechanically sentimental. Bertino certainly doubles down on familial decay in The Dark and the Wicked, a supernatural fable that elevates the subtext of the director’s earlier work to the level of text, in the process nearly dispensing with a monster altogether. It’s an elusive freak-out in the key of a Val Lewton production, with a lonely western-like atmosphere that reflects the protagonists’ disappointments.

As they respectively evolve as craftspeople, Flanagan and Bertino have developed opposing limitations as artists. Flanagan increasingly pulls his punches out of love for his characters, while Bertino’s The Dark and the Wicked is so claustrophobically hopeless that it feels as if it’s already over by the time the opening title flashes on screen. The mother and daughter of The Monster were piercingly alive in their disillusionment and yearning, while the Texan family of The Dark and the Wicked is composed of barely audible zombies who’re calcified by despair even before a shadowy, metaphoric thing begins skulking around their farm.

The farm’s unnamed patriarch (Michael Zagst) is bedridden with an undisclosed malady. Laid up in bed connected to tubes with healthcare workers circling him, he resembles someone who’s suffering from cancer or succumbing to dementia—a suggestion that connects The Dark and the Wicked to other recent horror movies that have utilized supernatural flourishes to examine familial death and diminishment, including Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Natalie Erika James’s Relic. Though the father appears ill, the matriarch (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) is convinced that his lifeforce is being sucked away by a demon or perhaps even the devil himself. Soon, the couple’s adult children, Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.), return and are caught up in the grips of either demonic invasion or their mother’s insanity.

Yet Bertino isn’t interested in involving his audience in a guessing game, as James partially was in Relic. The audience knows early on that something bad is present on this farm and that it’s going to assail this family without mercy. The father is already essentially in a coma, and since the mother is apparently following suit, Louise and Michael are next to bear the brunt of what appears to be a contagious or even inherited trauma. This scenario, paralleling how we take on the pain of our dying relatives, is metaphorically quite resonant, and James movingly exploited a similar premise in Relic, as Bertino did in The Monster. But the family of The Dark and the Wicked isn’t interesting and doesn’t appear salvageable, especially Louise and Michael, who pace around and mutter nearly indecipherably while maintaining a monotonously futile death watch over their old man. Bertino pushes a funereal quality to its breaking point, which is very much the intention, however maddening.

Bertino’s formalist brio prevents The Dark and the Wicked from entirely slipping into a coma of its own. Aiming for a mood piece in which narrative particulars and characters are secondary to an enveloping tonality of loss and regret, Bertino and cinematographer Tristan Nyby bathe the family’s farm in shadows and define it by a negative space that suggests the demanding, lonely hours of farm life, as well as offers dimensions in which a demon could be lingering anywhere. As he illustrated in The Strangers, Bertino has a very capable, Carpenter-esque way of establishing and exploiting spatial dynamics, which he utilizes here less for set pieces than for impressively sustaining an inchoate sense of dread.

It doesn’t hurt that Bertino, who grew up in Texas, appears to have some actual understanding of how farms work, milking low-thrumming suspense out of, say, the rattling of the fence used to keep in livestock, which the filmmakers also shoot with a keen and empathetic eye. (Tellingly, the death of the livestock here is more moving than the brutal demises of any of this film’s humans.) Bertino has classical chops, though here his classicism could use the visceral, disreputable goosing of a little rock ‘n’ roll—an occasional joke, for instance, or even a brief moment in which someone experienced a sensation other than fear, melancholia, or paralysis, would’ve proved refreshing. The Dark and the Wicked tries so hard to transcend its genre that it feels starchy, over-considered, emotionally freeze-dried.