The Dark and the Wicked (2020)
Premise: Mom and Pop live in a barn in San Medio of the Nada (Texas), and the adult kids come to basically start mourning because the dad’s about to die. Weird things start to happen in the property, though, and it’s not about “the dad has some terminal respiratory illness and this movie was filmed before 2020”, it’s more like… does it smell like sulfur to you?!
Under 90 minutes? five minutes over the line.
Do they say the title? nope, no they don’t.
One sentence review: going in blind, I thought this was going to be some cool folk horror but nope, it turns out it was religious horror
Okay, more: It’s surprising: up until the first third of the movie things just keep feeling more and more tense, culminating with a scene that is bone chilling but also gives you that sort of “what would I do in that situation?” kind of anxiety. Really cool and upsetting, scary stuff.
Aaaaand then the writer stops knowing what to do with the rest of the film and it basically becomes a series of farts and jumpscares one after another. Disappointing.
A simple way to improve it: There’s this very cool and spooky scene by the beginning of the movie where the main character doesn’t notice that after the camera moves, now there’s a shadow behind her, but the next time the camera focus on her the shadow’s no longer there and then there’s a jumpscare. This would have been a really memorable scene if the movie didn’t repeat it every five minutes from then on and until the end.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
Before it was canceled, The Dark and the Wicked would have had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
… the scariest of all film festivals…