A girl tip-toes into a basement. Hesitantly, the camera creeps past withering flowers on the window sill and dolls scattered on the dank, unlit floor. Something’s making noises in the world’s largest furnace room, and an unfortunate babysitter is going to find out the source the hard way. Cut to an ancient creature (or hungry mom?) devouring a newborn. A pointless cry for help is juxtaposed with a shot of witchcraft symbols carved into the door above. Spooky. While cellars are always a welcome sight in horror flicks, they are especially creepy in “The Wretched.”
The latest from IFC Midnight conjures the ghost of low-budget, ’80s horror, putting a sharp spin on “Fright Night,” Spielberg-ian tropes and other “troubled-kid-in-a-small-town” genre fare. Directors Brett and Drew Pierce are in their element mixing a witches brew of moody atmospherics and bone-crunching, head-spinning scares. (That cellar prologue is just a taste of what’s to come). But they aren’t content with simply piling on the kills—though they are quite good at it. The Pierce Brothers also have empathy for their lonely protagonist, Ben (John-Paul Howard), whose parents are getting divorced and who can’t stand dad’s (Jamison Jones) small-town vibe. Go figure. Unspeakable things are happening next door.
As his helicopter neighbors start acting strange—a metaphor for Ben’s own fluctuating family—he starts to regret staying at dad’s house over the summer. Viewers, on the other hand, are happy to visit a lake town nestled in Michigan, and the Pierces try to distinguish their film through this sense of place. But in constantly reinforcing nods to Spielberg, Michigan here could pass for suburban California (“E.T”) or Martha’s Vineyard (“Jaws”). All the same, when local teens ride their bikes past a dead deer, oblivious to hands exiting its stomach and dripping noises on the audioscape, we watch in a state of panic as if we hadn’t seen this exact same shot a million times.
What “The Wretched” lacks in originality, it makes up for with seriously hairy visuals and well-staged rituals. Ben starts spying on his neighbors with binoculars. Noticing a pattern in the mother’s behavior, he approaches a girl named Mallory (Piper Curda) for help. She’s the only teen in town who isn’t a douche, and Curda brings a humorous glow to a gallimaufry of grey skies, most notably when she pokes fun at Ben’s Witchipedia searches. “You’re Nutter Butters,” she tells him. When they discover the little boy next door is missing, Mallory takes it back. Maybe Ben’s google search, revealing witches to be “dark mothers born from trees,” could actually be real. She thinks it’s time to take a closer look.
In an inspired bit of writing, the narrative slices back and forth between Ben’s investigation and his yearning for maternal connection. The script frames divorce and flesh-eating creatures as equal opportunity destroyers—both have the ability to leave someone dead inside. And this raison d’etre puts the Pierce’s B-picture a notch above your average horror flick. There are ambition and genuine emotion on display that’s all-too-rare in today’s horror flicks. It’s refreshing to see Ben fight for something more than his life. In most modern horror films, teens are thrown into jump scare scenarios just for the sake of cheap thrills.
While that lack of action can sometimes suck the life out of the film’s pacing just like these witches do to flowers, the ends justify the means. As the coda splurges on forest set-pieces enhanced by CGI, it never loses sight of what made earlier scenes click (natural effects, disorienting cutaways). Besides, genre buffs are probably more interested in witch’s kidnapping children than Ben’s family divorce. But the Pierce’s deliver on both fronts, so much so that you may never walk into a basement again. [B-]