Shudder has been in touch to tell us that they will release The Dark and the Wicked on their streaming service later this month. The genre piece will land on Shudder from 25 February 2021. We reviewed this one at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2020 calling it ‘a melancholy, slow-burn that will divide audiences, but offers enough dread and winch-inducing injury to make for a satisfying watch’.
Bringing together the sun-drenched look of recent rave Midsommar with the blood-curdling gothic dread of The Turn of the Screw, acclaimed filmmaker Bryan Bertino (The Strangers, The Monster) returns to the home environment to mine more psychological terror and sophisticated scares in a film which goes straight to the heart of fractured family dynamics.
On a secluded farm, a man is bedridden and fighting through his final breaths while his wife (Julie Oliver-Touchstone, Preacher) slowly succumbs to overwhelming grief. Siblings Louise (Marin Ireland, Hell or High Water) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr., The Death of Dick Long) 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.
A trailer can be viewed below. Check out our full review from Fantasia here.
