Film Review: The Wretched
Piper Curda and John-Paul Howard in The Wretched. Photo: Rialto Distribution.
The Wretched, the second feature from writer-directors the Pierce brothers,is a mediocre horror film that reuses generic tropes in a shallow yet visually engaging story. The film follows Ben, a troubled seventeen-year-old, who goes to stay at his father’s house in a small port town. Soon after arriving, however, he begins to suspect that there is something strange going on in the next-door neighbours’ house.
The Wretched spends a lot of time on Ben’s coming of age struggles, complete with stereotypical teen-movie scenes of parties and bullies. When it finally settles into the horror, though, it provides some interesting visuals. The filmmakers’ use ofpractical effects is admirable, given the tendency of recent horror films to resort to CGI scares. The film is also, thankfully, not overly reliant on loud sounds to create tension. Indeed, The Wretched is at its best when it makes a concerted effort at subtlety: shadows in the corner of the frame; grey fingers curling out from behind a tree; an understated score. But the film is ultimately let down by a script which offers only a half-baked justification for these chilling moments.
There is a noticeable lack of lore underlying the supernatural events of the film. It is never fully explained why these spooky occurrences are taking place in an otherwise relaxed and sunny coastal town. The only attempt at explanation comes in a brief Google search scene which is comicallysimilar to the one in Twilight(2008), complete with dramatic close ups of vaguely spooky key words, such as ‘dark mother’ and ‘the forgotten’. It feels like the filmmakers are merely gesturing to a vague, standard horror premise: there’s a monster, you know the rest.
Indeed, the film offers up few new ideas to the crowded horror genre, instead borrowing from things we’ve seen before. There is pagan, ritualistic iconography previously seen in films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Hereditary (2018); there are grotesque bodies similar to that in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015); there is an underground search for a monster, reminiscent of It (2017).
John-Paul Howard in The Wretched. Photo: Rialto Distribution.
Rear Window (1954) is also a clear influence. In several scenes, Ben watches his neighbours in their home through binoculars, taking a voyeuristic pleasure in this task which is never fully unpacked. The idea of a supernatural Rear Window is cool; yet the film squanders this potentially engaging premise by showing us from the beginning exactly what is happening inside the neighbours’ house. This removes nearly all intrigue, all tension: it’s as if Hitchcock, after James Stewart first notices his neighbour behaving strangely across the courtyard, were to immediately cut to inside the neighbour’s apartment.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Wretched is the lack of a clear thematic link between Ben’s coming of age troubles and the supernatural events taking place. There is an interesting movie here somewhere— one which, like the films to which it pays homage, explores the links between horror and sexual frustration, family problems, or teen angst. None of these ideas are fleshed out enough, however, leaving only surface-level tropes.
The film does pick up somewhat in the third act, becoming kind of fun in a schlocky, eighties B-movie kind of way. If you ignored the theme and story problems and just went in for the visuals, The Wretched could be a fun enough watch with friends on a Saturday night. Just don’t expect it to be as haunting as the films it’s influenced by.
2.5/5
The Wretched is available to rent On Demand from 2 September via Google Play, Fetch TV, Microsoft & Apple TV