Movie Review: The Wretched is a Sloppy Horror Mess

The opening scenes of The Wretched follow a teenager arriving at a suburban home for a babysitting job. When she arrives, the home is eerily quiet. She calls her mother and establishes a casual tone. That’s interrupted by a strange noise in the basement. The unnamed babysitter goes to investigate.

It’s daytime, mid-afternoon, and this is not your typically creepy and dank basement. The babysitter is calling out for the child she’s there to sit for or the child’s parents. What she finds first is the early makings of a terrifying shrine. A few feet away, behind a curtain, comes a terrible, snarling, growling noise. Bad idea or not, the babysitter is overcome with curiosity and goes to investigate. What she finds is chilling, the mother is nude and scarred and demonic. Worse yet, she’s feasting upon the child.

The mother is, for a moment anyway, the ‘Wretched’ of the title. The Wretched is a witch that slithers inside the skin of attractive mother’s and uses her mysterious powers to enchant husbands and fathers to forget that they have young children. This is so that the Wretched can eat the children without anyone knowing about it. By the time anyone comes to investigate, she’s sloughed off the skin of of the mother, eaten the child and enchanted the father into suicide.

Then, the Wretched presumably runs off to act out this murderous act all over again. But first, we must establish our main characters. The Wretched stars John-Paul Howell as Ben. Ben has just moved to a seaside town where his dad, Liam (Jamison Jones), has moved following an amicable divorce from Ben’s mom. Ben has some trouble in his past and dad is hoping some father and son time can straighten him out. It’s also an opportunity for dad to introduce his son to his new girlfriend, Sara (Azie Tesfal). Note the competing tensions in that set-up, it’s a good dramatic base.

The Wretched’s next target is Ben’s neighbor, Abbie (Zara Mahler), her husband, Ty (Kevin Bigley), and their son, Dillon (Blane Crockerell). The plot kicks in when the kid, Dillon, sees his mom in Wretched form and runs away to hide at Ben’s house. He’s soon retrieved by his dad but not before Abbie creeps the holy hell out of Ben.

Soon, Dillon is missing and it’s up to Ben and his new crush, Mallory (Piper Curda), to find Dillon before he becomes an afternoon snack. That all sounds simple enough right. There are echoes of horror film’s past, including a pretty effective tribute to Rear Window, and enough new elements to give The Wretched a reason to stand alone. There are complications related to Ben’s personal life and how those complications are reflected in the life changing battle with pure evil.

So, why is the movie not very good?

Let's start with our main character, Ben. Actor John-Paul Howard is... fine. He's charismatic just enough so we don't hate him. He's kind of a ghosting jerk to his crush, Mallory, which doesn't endear him to us. By the end of The Wretched, well, I didn't want him to die or anything but I wasn't much invested in his fate one way or the other. He's not very compelling as a hero. He's a reactor not an actor within this plot.

The Wretched fails in other ways because it’s lazy, lax and vague. The Wretched renders convoluted what should be straightforward and specific. The Wretched monster wants to eat children and get away with it using her demonic Jedi-mind-trick. That’s the elevator pitch. Unfortunately, no one bothered to think much more beyond that.

The villain of The Wretched, a nameless witch, has plot convenient powers and motives. Instead of sticking to the simple elevator pitch I mentioned earlier, we are left to contemplate the decisions of this villain character and it becomes exhausting in how inconsistent that she is. When Dillon sees his mother in her Wretched form, the demon having slithered inside Abbie's skin, she doesn't attack him. She doesn't set upon the previously indicated purpose, she walks away.

Why? Why wait? Why not attack and eat the kid then and there? What's with letting the kid run off next door and blow the secret of her existence to Ben? This isn't about a consistent character narrative, it's about lazy convenience. Lazy writing requires a way to loop Ben into the plot. Dillon can't just get eaten by the monster, he's needed to keep the movie going, even if that means rendering the main villain ineffective and not very smart.

It's established that the villain doesn't want to get caught. She enchants people with the purpose of wiping their memory so she can eat their children and get away with it. But then she ends up killing her female host and their husband in the process leaving behind corpses that should have drawn someone's attention at some point.

This is all the set up for a second act in which the filmmakers feel the need to throw in a reference to Rear Window. Ben has a cast on his arm, which is enough to qualify as visual reference because Jimmy Stewart had a broken leg in Rear Window. Broken limb in a cast, that's a reference right? Sigh! Anyway, once Dillon disappears, Ben wants to search for him and spends multiple scenes watching the neighbors through binoculars. Hey remember Rear Window? That's a good movie.

Next inconvenient question, if the Witch villain of The Wretched can enchant anyone to forget Dillon existed, why not just enchant Ben and be done with him? Or, why not kill and eat Ben? Is he too old for her taste? She presumably killed the babysitter in the opening of the movie, why can't she kill Ben and his girlfriend?

We aren't supposed to spend time thinking about things like this but when the the characters in a movie aren't interesting enough to distract us from the plot holes, what else are we to do? The characters in The Wretched aren't colorful, lively or romantic enough for us to be distracted from the many, many narratively convenient plot holes that expose the laziness of the script.

The Wretched is a mess. It is not poorly made but it lacks focus and cohesion. The Wretched relies on vagary and style to hide the fact that the movie isn’t very well thought out. The main antagonist, the ‘Wretched’ of the title, has a poorly established motivation and the tension in the movie comes not from a strongly established plot or characters we care about, but rather from a sense that anything can happen at any time.

The witch can be anywhere and do anything and that is not a satisfying way to build tension or suspense. For instance, the fact that Freddy Krueger could only kill someone in the dreamworld established a rule that created an innate tension. Sleep is inevitable and sleep is where danger and death await. The Wretched witch has no rules or restrictions and the tension is forced, manufactured from the notion that at any moment she could pop up and say boo!

That is an exhausting way to enact a horror movie.

In a separate piece that I wrote about The Wretched called Establishing the Corkscrew: Visual Film-making in The Wretched, I laid out a scene that demonstrates the clumsy ways in which the makers of The Wretched consistently take us, the audience, out of the movie to focus on the mechanics of film-making and plot.

The corkscrew scene is quite strong from a visual and directorial perspective. However, it exposes the business of the movie. It lays bare the mechanics of how directors direct a movie. The corkscrew scene is minor, unnecessary and yet it demonstrates why The Wretched fails as a movie because the directors don't take enough care with visual or textual storytelling. They only care about a few creepy visuals and the mechanics of manufacturing jump scares.

The directors, brothers, Drew T Pierce and Bret Pierce, are not untalented. They have a strong grasp of the basics of directing a movie. What they lack is a script that gives depth, meaning and room to breath to their strong visual sensibility. This is well demonstrated in the frequent use of an animal skull as a visual motif in the film's marketing campaign.

The marketing of The Wretched focuses heavily on this animal skull. You assume the skull is important to the villain of The Wretched. All things indicate that this skull has meaning and purpose and, spoiler alert, it appears in two scenes and serves no purpose other than skulls look creepy. At one point, the witch wears the skull as a mask. There is no reason for her to wear this mask, it's just a neato visual that the directors thought looked cool. It does look cool. That doesn't give it a reason to be in the movie.

That skull sums up the whole of The Wretched. They had a cool idea for some creep-tastic visuals and sound design for the witch/villain character and little else. The sound design on the monster, her gurgling and cracking bones are really good horror stuff. The sound and the visual turn your stomach the way a good horror villain should.

Sadly, it's all sound and visual fury signifying a nothing plot filled with dull characters. It all builds to a highly convoluted twist and an artistically bankrupt sequel tease. Because what modern horror movie doesn't have an accountant at heart planning for how much money can be made from dragging out a premise to endless sequels of ever diminishing quality.

The Wretched is now available for streaming rental from IFC Midnight.

Post-Script: Why is this movie called The Wretched? Is it because that sounds like a horror word? Wretched. The definition of Wretched is very unfortunate in condition or circumstances; miserable; pitiable. That's kind of how I might describe the witch villain character but, I didn't pity her. She was miserable but the unfortunate condition was more for her victim than for her. Oh well.