| Director(s) | Adam MacDonald |
| Principal Cast | Nicole Munoz as Leah Reyes Laurie Holden as Mrs.Reyes |
| Release Date | 2017 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 90 minutes |
Pywacket takes a family drama about the agitations of growing up and dealing with grief and combines it with slow burn supernatural horror in an attempt to highlight the consequences of emotional decision making and communicative mishaps. After a series of tense and emotionally fueled agitations with her mother, Leah decides enough is enough and wishes for the former’s death. Unbeknownst to her, dark forces were listening and she’s forced deal with the consequences of her ill-begotten wish.
The story takes a while to build up and the supernatural elements don’t really ratchet up till the third act. The core of the movie is the drama between Leah and her mom and their inability to deal with the loss of their father/husband. Each party has valid grievances but can never find a way to gauge the other on it. Watching them struggle to communicate hits real emotional nerves because it feels so real. Their disagreements feel commonplace and easy to locate in our own lives. It also helps that Munoz and Holden bring vulnerability and volatility in all of their interactions, so its easy to get lost in the emotional ebb and flow at the heart of the movie.
Parent-children relationships always involve a level of friction because of the nature of the bond. Parents have to love and care for their children while maintaining their own well-being, and children have to listen to their parents, grow, and figure out their own path in the world. Clash is inevitable and sometimes when passions get too heated, we want awful things to happen to the other person. It’s scary to think about how dark our heads can go with enough stress and damage . Thankfully for us, the passions are usually momentary- fleeting moments of malevolence lost in transit. The reason the horror in Pyewacket works is because it forces us to confront our worst fears- what if that awful thing we wished on someone actually happened?
Unfortunately, as interesting as the concept of the movie is , it’s executed without a lot of creativity. Supernatural events happen whenever the story determines they’re convenient and nothing is ever that jarring as a visual scare. I’m someone who likes scary sequences to have some kind of purpose or explanation, but the malevolent entity in this movie just acts when it wants to in random ways, so its hard to distinguish it from other scary oddities in other movies. Like, Pywacket is a witch’s familiar. There’s so much potential there, and instead it’s just creepy supernatural entity #945. Now to Macdonald’s credit, the third act has some tense sequences and terrifying moments of realization at what’s actually going on, but it feels a bit formulaic given the cool set up the story has going for itself. Sure there are no jump scares, but there’s also not some batshit super fun absurd out there ending like The House of the Devil. That feels like a shame.
The movie also tries to incorporate Leah’s friends into different scenes but none of them feel fleshed out or close to her at all. I was left wondering how any of them were friends or what the dynamic between them was. Especially with how some of the scenes progressed, I figured that they would be better incorporated into the scares or the themes, but they’re just kind of cast aside.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | Pyewacket is family drama about grief amplified with supernatural consequences. It’s a story about the dangers of emotional decision-making and the pitfalls of not communicating effectively. If you’re okay with a slow burn without any huge visceral payoffs, this is the movie for you. It may flub the third act a bit, but it tackles some very real fears and issues we all thinnk about. |
| Rating | 8.2/10 |
| Grade | B |
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