Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: John-Paul Howard, Piper Curdo, Jamison Jones, Azie Tesfai, Zarah Mahler, Kevin Bigley, Gabriela Quezada Bloomgarden, Richard Ellis, Blane Crockarell, Judah Abner Paul, Ja’layah Washington, Amy Waller, Ross Kidder, Kasey Bell, Harry Burkey.
The difficulty is not in the application of writing a story about a witch, but in the deed of persuading the audience that the one at the heart of the story is not a cliche. One of the oldest protagonists in literature, the witch is greeted with either false doctrine or with a sense of damage in which the guarded and the wary find alluring to the point of intoxication.
Whether as seen through the eyes of Macbeth, in the fairly misinformed writings of King James in Daemonologie, in the mirroring of society’s fanaticism to purge the nation of powerful and independent women in Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum or in any number of books written since, witches, witchcraft and black magic tend to go hand in hand as a warning to the young to be suspicious of those who are different, who practice what is to be considered the conjuring of evil.
Transferring this consideration to cinema has become an art form, and in one of the best examples of recent years, 2016’s The Witch, the film worked because it kept the story and the production simple. There is always a tendency to over burden the film with effects that in the end only serve to act as gory titillation for the horror fan, the more gruesome the detail, the greater the hope of the studio and the film makers is captured in the bottom line.
To use such a notion to sell a story is nothing new, but it is limiting the sense of womanhood and degrading overwhelmingly the way women are perceived in society. There is always room for a good witch story, and The Wretched does its absolute best to capture the enormity of the genre without spilling over into worn out formulas. However, it must be noted that the film itself offers no explanation for the being, the reason behind the monster; only a cinematic bluff to suggest that the evil, like Lilith, has been around since time immemorial.
Whilst the effects are commonplace across all of all Horror films, it has to be noted that The Wretched does excel in this department, it is elsewhere though that the film fails to capture the imagination, its dialogue, its sentiment and the understanding that the characters act as they have done throughout cinema history, is to be blunt, lacking in originality. A shame really as The Wretched could have added an innovative slant on the idea of witchcraft.
A film that does no harm, one that is easy on the eye but which lacks the big kick to catch you unawares and have the film lover trembling with excitement of what is to come.
Ian D. Hall