“She’s making people forget their own children.”
A solid opening can sometimes spell doom for a movie. It Follows and The Conjuring make good on theirs; Dawn of the Dead and The Bye Bye Man fall woefully short of the promises of theirs. The Wretched has a damn fine cold open – it’s quick, nasty, and paced like a short film. These are a double-edged sword, though; when I think of Dawn of the Dead, I try to remember the bravura opening, not the ham-fisted social commentary or motorcycle pie fights. Unfortunately, when I think of The Wretched, I will think of the cold open.
The setup is pretty standard: troubled teen goes to live with his dad until Things Get Sorted Out. The Wretched‘s writer-directors, Brett and Drew Pierce, wear their influences on their sleeve. There’s a little bit of Christopher Pike’s Fear Street in here, along with helpings of Stephen King’s It and The Outsider. (Maybe even a dash of Joyland.) The troubled teen in question is Ben Shaw (John-Paul Howard), who has an unexplained broken arm and a penchant for stealing things. He takes up work at his father’s marina, where he meets Mallory (Piper Curda, in the film’s best performance).
The Wretched is a pretty slow burn for its first third, but that’s a feature, not a bug. The logline of this movie – a teenage boy must fight a thousand-year old witch who he believes has possessed his neighbor – does little to sell the scope. In one of the film’s few strokes of innovation, the neighbor in question, Abbie, is given a full life: kids, a husband, aspirations toward butchery. She has interiority and a narrative that isn’t immediately entwined with Ben’s. The actress playing Abbie, Zahra Mahler, is fine if unremarkable, but she’s likable enough that her inevitable transformation into something ghoulish has enough tragedy to balance out the horror.
Credit where it’s due: The Wretched has a hell of a monster. Granted, it’s a riff on Hannibal‘s Wendigo, but that design was perfect, so even a knockoff is going to look pretty good. There are some great gory moments in here, most notably the monster tearing its way out of a deer’s belly. (Why, though, would Abbie try to field dress a deer in her driveway, then leave the animal unattended during the night?) The monster represents a mean streak that The Wretched seems to shy away from at times when it should be embraced. Abbie goes to check on her baby, only to find a bundle of sticks where the child once was. That’s a great image, and one wishes that The Wretched would stretch itself more, now that we know it can. Unfortunately, that’s when we get the common horror image of hands yanking somebody under something else. Been there, seen that, but the wet crunching noises are appropriately unsettling.
This is where The Wretched introduces its Rear Window riff, as Ben begins obsessively spying on Abbie next door, certain that something evil is going on. He’s not wrong, but Abbie is pretty open about it. Also, there’s no other good place to point this out, but God is Abbie’s husband, Ty, just awful. He’s rude and mean to everyone and the actor playing him, Kevin Bigley, does nothing to suggest anything beyond the surface with Ty. I digress. Well, maybe I don’t, because the performances are this film’s biggest stumbling block.
John-Paul Howard mostly fights a losing battle against blandness, but he’s young enough to make Ben a mostly believable teenager, one who does dumb teenage stuff like leave Mallory to go skinny-dipping with another girl. Elsewhere, the film mainly relies on stock characters, like the immortal Boat Bully, which here takes the shape of Gage; one of his first lines is “This is my father’s boat.” He shows up periodically to mock or beat Ben. Strangely enough, apart from Curda the film’s best performance is courtesy of Blane Crockarell as Abbie’s son Dillon. Kids in movies are annoying, almost as a rule, but Crockarell taps into an emotional reservoir that makes Dillon not only believable, but also likable. No mean feat.
The Wretched manages to (mostly) nail its ending. The film is like a rope that’s taut on either end but sags in the middle. The ending doesn’t make perfect sense, but the lore is never fully explained. That could be a feature or a bug, depending on your taste. I’m still torn on it; as a matter of fact I’m mostly lukewarm on this movie, which makes it hard to write about. There is some promise here, as well as an overabundance of cliches. The Pierce brothers could have a solid career ahead of them. Ironically, they might need to watch fewer horror films.
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