Director Bryan Bertino is most well known for his directorial debut, The Strangers, a quietly terrifying home invasion story. The gradual destruction of the home, figuratively and literally, has been the focus of Bertino’s entire career, from the couple in The Strangers to the families in Mockingbird to the mother and daughter in The Monster.

Add to that list the siblings at the center of The Dark and the Wicked, returning to the family farm to help their mother cope with the looming loss of their sick father. She doesn’t want them there, and at first, it seems a familial rift could be the cause of her distance. But an unexpected tragedy reveals their mother’s true fears.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because there are echoes of these plot points and themes in a number of recent indie horror films, from Relic to Hereditary. The last few years have created something of a subgenre with somber, slow-paced “grief as horror” arthouse films from studios like A24. With that ground so well worn recently, is there something new that The Dark and the Wicked brings to the table?

Bertino’s greatest skill as a filmmaker has always been narrative simplicity and emotional clarity. Rather than building towards an elaborate puzzle box revelation that brings all the pieces together, he allows us to simply sit, uncomfortably quiet amongst this family, feeling the blanket of grief that hangs over each moment. The sadness is palpable in this film, along with an undefined but powerful sense of dread.

Punctuated moments of violence, visions of loved ones thought dead, and torturous instructions whispered in the dead of night don’t finally come together to provide some grand revelation. They are tragic moments made all the more horrifying because they exist without a unifying purpose, unjust acts that will nonetheless go unpunished in a seemingly ambivalent universe.

Marin Ireland, a fantastic stage actress known best on TV for Sneaky Pete and The Umbrella Academy, anchors the film with a haunted performance that isn’t as immediately iconic as Toni Collette in Hereditary, but she brings nuance and believability without going over the top. Michael Abbott, Jr., an actor relatively unknown to me before this film, gives a performance as the brother that is so lived-in and authentic that it barely feels like acting at all.

The film is beautifully shot on location on Bertino’s own family’s Texas farm, which is a powerful metaphor for the family itself, a seemingly idyllic place secretly teeming with darkness. The tone of the film is pitch black and relentless. It is clear that was the intent, and the director was successful in achieving his goal, though that may not make it broadly appealing.

The one nitpick with the film was its reliance on a specific type of scare, used at least three times and perhaps more, that is at first effective but increasingly takes you out of the narrative every time it is used again. It is a minor quibble, however, in a film that is otherwise strong and assured in its tone and execution. The disc itself is bare bones in terms of extras, with only a Q&A and no other filmmaker interviews or commentaries; but the transfer looks stunning, keeping in line with Bertino’s previous work.

The film’s final moments may leave audiences scratching their heads or wondering, but it fits exactly with what Bertino set out to do: tell an unflinching tale of a family staring into the abyss of grief and loss, performing the same dance of acceptance and denial that we all do with mortality, before life gives us the answer we can no longer avoid.

4 out of 5 stars

THE DARK AND THE WICKED Blu-ray includes the bonus feature Fantasia Q&A with Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr.

In THE DARK AND THE WICKED, on a secluded farm, a man is bedridden and fighting through his final breaths while his wife slowly succumbs to overwhelming grief. Siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) return home to help, but it doesn’t take long for them to see that something’s wrong with mom—something more than her heavy sorrow. Gradually, they begin to suffer a darkness similar to their mother’s, marked by waking nightmares and a growing sense that an evil entity is taking over their family.

Starring Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., Xander Berkeley
Written and directed by Bryan Bertino