The Wretched, 2020.
Directed by Brett Pierce and Drew T. Pierce.
Starring John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Jamison Jones, Azie Tesfai, Zarah Mahler and Kevin Bigley.
SYNOPSIS:
A teenager becomes suspicious that his next door neighbour is a witch with the power to make people forget their own children.
The opening title sequence of The Wretched is one that evokes the peril of children, with a cuddly bunny rabbit, broken crayons and toy cars soaked by rain in a grey landscape. It’s a statement of intent that The Wretched largely follows through in efficiently creepy fashion. This is a gloomy but engrossing horror-cum-mystery that masks its rather generic trappings with a third act that piles on a series of killer knife-twists.
Troubled adolescent Ben (John-Paul Howard) has travelled to an idyllic seaside resort to spend the summer with his dad (Jamison Jones) in the hope that it will help him stay out of trouble for a while. He gets a part-time job at the harbour and bonds with co-worker Mallory (Piper Curda), but is distracted by the odd neighbours next door. Free-spirited mother Abby (Zarah Mahler) has gained a sort of simmering malevolence, while she and her husband are both denying that they ever had a child – despite the fact we’ve already seen her and the kid disturb some sort of woodland spirit.
Howard’s performance slots nicely into the typical mould of the justifiably paranoid horror movie lead, as he works hard to prove histheories that there’s a witch living next door. The enjoyably snarky Curda – she has no time for his use of GIF-heavy website “Witch-o-pedia” – has an easy chemistry with her co-star and the scenes with them together are among the strongest in the movie, though their relationship is never fleshed out to the extent that it arguably should be.
In fact, there’s a nagging feeling throughout The Wretched that we’re following the less interesting part of the story. There’s a lot of time spent on Ben’s troubled back-story and in his relationship with his dad, which feels incidental for most of the film and largely seems to manifest in contrived drama around Ben’s new stepmother (Azie Tespai). All of the interesting, horror-tinged stuff is happening in the neighbours’ home and it’s especially galling given that the other family seems more unique and intriguing even before things start to go bump in the night.
That bumping, too, is a little under-cooked. There are a handful of effective jolts and some impressive creature design around the woodland wraith, but it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before in dozens of supernatural horror movies over the years. The Wretched is an effective scare ride, but it’s also a desperately generic one that fails to make the most of the more interesting ideas in the Pierce brothers’ script. The notion of the creature making families forget their own children is a creepy one, but the impact of it is seldom spotlighted by the storytelling.
Fortunately, The Wretched finds a different gear with its ending, achieved via a selection of elegantly realised plot twists that recontextualise much of what has come before. There’s an intelligence to the third act that is sadly absent from the previous hour and it allows Howard’s performance to find new layers and complexities. For the most part, this is a comfortably ordinary horror with some neat scares but, in its conclusion, it finds impressive darkness that makes it a particularly interesting genre treat.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
