I cannot fault any horror fan who let The Dark and the Wicked slip pass their radar. It was released in 2020 during the height of a global pandemic, before finding a home on the horror streaming platform Shudder. To be honest, I had not heard about this film until it popped up on a number of year-end best horror lists. And now that I have seen it, I simply cannot understand how it wasn’t always listed on the top of every list. I can’t think of a single film released in 2020 that checks off more boxes for what constitutes a great modern horror better than this one.

For those who don’t know, The Dark and the Wicked is a very, very nasty atmospheric horror by director Brian Bertino. (Bertino’s home invasion classic The Strangers is also a The Midnight Selections.) It’s about two adult children that come back to their childhood farmhouse to be with their estranged father who is literally upstairs lying on his deathbed. Once there, they find their mother trying her very best, when not ignoring them, to get them to go home. And it does not take long before Bertino drops hints that some sort of ominous presence does not really want them there either.

To describe The Dark and the Wicked is to risk oversimplifying its premise. If an invisible entity wants to be alone with the father when he dies, then all the adult children need to do is outlast the predator until the father takes his last breath…right? Except the sinister, increasingly nihilistic tone of The Dark and the Wicked suggests that it might not be the type of movie where things are moving towards a clean resolution or a happy ending. (In this way, it is a lot like Hereditary.)  The demon’s power and purpose is not defined. And nobody in this film is going to simply stumble upon a helpful newspaper clipping in the local library that leads to unburied bones. When up against an evil this powerful, it is possible that the right thing to do is to say “screw it” to filial responsibility and let the fiend have father.

There are some who will not like The Dark and the Wicked because this type of evil feels too foreign. Those that watch horror films regularly have expectations about how an evil entity should behave. As an audience, we are trained to look for patterns or vulnerabilities, something tangible that a protagonist can exploit to fight back. But the evil in The Dark and the Wicked is unrelenting and its behaviour is unpredictable. It will patiently wait for one, unextraordinary man to die of natural causes while mercilessly pushing others towards a much more abrupt demise. Its only clear behaviour seems to be to try to inflect the maximum amount of pain on its victims; and as you get nearer to the film’s end, you start to wonder if the father is really the prize or if he he actually might just be bait? Or is he both? Nothing is certain, but looking back at the film, its obvious that the evil’s cruelty has a deliberate psychological aspect to it.

This is an evil that also turns out to be frighteningly good at multitasking.

But at the heart of this otherwise heartless film is a tragic tale of a family that squanders its opportunities to communicate. Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. do an excellent job playing the two adult children who both seemed to have demolished their opportunity to renew their relationship with their parents. All that is left is to attempt to restore their relationship with each other; however, this is a challenge when the things most urgent to discuss are also hard to believe. The Dark and the Wicked puts the siblings in an impossible situation where their survival is dependant on each other, yet neither proves to be particularly dependable and both seem reluctant to have that much needed honest conversation. And yet the mistakes they make are human, and their antagonist is awfulness personified, so it’s easy to continue rooting for them, even when you wonder how much they might have contributed to their family’s inevitable demise.

Simply put, I love this film. I feel like Brian Bertino read my mind, saw what I wanted in a horror film, and then made that movie. It is mean. It is mostly atmospheric, but has a few really good scares too. It lingers in the mind after viewing. I personally hope no plans exist for some type of The Dark and the Wicked sequel or an unnecessary extended director’s cut. I do not want better insight into what has transpired. I like coming to my own horrible conclusions. This film is perfect as it is.