Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
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.
The Dark and the Wicked is a slow-burn rural horror that excels in atmosphere and dread, with Bryan Bertino's direction yielding genuinely oppressive, beautifully bleak cinematography that makes the isolated Texas farmhouse feel like a place where light itself is dying. The performances are committed and grounded, particularly Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. as the grieving siblings. The plot is a fairly familiar possession/haunting framework elevated by its relentless pessimism and emotional weight around grief. Where the film falters most is its ending, which offers little resolution or catharsis and feels more nihilistically incomplete than deliberately ambiguous, leaving the audience without the payoff the buildup promises. Novelty is moderate — it's atmospheric folk horror in the tradition of mid-tier A24-adjacent films, distinctive in tone and execution but not radically original in conception.