Metacritic reviews

It’s a visceral piece of horror that’s as bleak as it is beautiful.

Make no mistake about it, The Dark and the Wicked is by far the scariest movie at the Fantasia Film Festival, and its due in large part to Ireland’s neurotic catatonia. You find yourself holding your breath, waiting to see what spine-chilling event hovers just ahead, hiding behind a dark corner.

Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.

The Dark and the Wicked pulls no punches, either in its sense of perpetual unease, its occasional moments of understated yet truly stomach-churning gore, or in its emotional heft.

Although its bleak worldview may be a turnoff for viewers who like their media a bit more life-affirming, if you’ve ever said to a friend, “it’s so fucked up, you’ve got to see it,” The Dark And The Wicked is one horror movie that lives up to its title.

This is the Devil’s story. The Dark and the Wicked is Satan entertaining himself with the dread of those he could kill in an instant if he wanted. But he doesn’t. He wants them to endure an agony they never thought possible and for us to question the veracity of what we see.

Ireland conveys subtle differences between paranoia and white-knuckled fear with an appealing fragility, while Oliver-Touchstone invites sympathy and disquiet with just a few twitches of her wrinkles. However, the glaring absence of any background to the main characters’ lives and relationships gives the cast less to work with than they deserve.

The players sell it. And the jolts — an apparition here, a ghost in a shadows there — get the job done.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

Despite a strong start, Bertino’s grim and gruesome The Dark and the Wicked never coalesces into anything more than a collection of chilling images and a paper-thin logic.