phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2021

The Dark And The Wicked



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 1h 35min
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror
Plot Summary: On a secluded farm in a nondescript rural town, a man is slowly dying. His family gathers to mourn, and soon a darkness grows, marked by waking nightmares and a growing sense that something evil is taking over the family.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Unnerving and nihilistic throughout. Sometimes wicked things happen to good people for no reason, regardless of your religious beliefs and good intentions.


Outside Reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The movie's focus on the emotional dynamics of parents and children makes it a companion piece to psychologically driven recent horror films like The Babadook and Mama, where the process of grieving and facing fear of a parent's death (and everyone's death) manifests itself in the form of weird happenings and creepy images that are basically metaphors transformed into actions and beings. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that there's a reason why human beings have traditionally described doing work on one's own psyche as wrestling with demons.


Katie Rife
Grade: B - The Dark And The Wicked lives up to its title

This sense of morbid inevitability, of death laughing at humanity's feeble platitudes about the power of love and God's plan, is at the heart of The Strangers writer-director Bryan Bertino's savagely efficient new film The Dark And The Wicked. This film is about vicious nihilism as much as it is about anything, and if a character expresses hope or happiness at any point during its compact 95-minute running time, you can bet that fate is going to make them look like a fool. Even the moralistic message that lurks under the surface of many horror movies is absent here; the evil in this film appears to be Biblical in nature, but faith and virtue are no more effective at stopping it than denying its existence altogether.