PYEWACKET (2018)

Genre: Thriller
Director: Adam MacDonald
Cast: Nicole Muñoz, Laurie Holden, Chloe Rose
Runtime: 1 hr 28 mins
Rating: NC16 (Drug Use and Some Disturbing Scenes)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 29 March 2018

Synopsis:  A frustrated, angst-ridden teenage girl awakens something in the woods when she naively performs an occult ritual to evoke a witch to kill her mother.

Movie Review:

If you’re expecting an all-out demonic horror film, then ‘Pyewacket’ is not going to be that movie for you. Instead, Canadian writer-director Adam MacDonald’s sophomore feature film after his 2014 wilderness adventure ‘Backcountry’ is a slow-burn psychodrama that is more interested in the dysfunction between a mother and her teenage daughter than in the titular demon itself, which only appears in the last fifteen minutes and is even then only briefly seen in its full form.

What MacDonald has chosen to form fully is how Leah (Nicole Munoz), a Goth-styled lass with an interest in the occult, navigates the day-to-day with her mother (Laurie Holden) following the recent death of her father. Leah’s mother is already barely holding it together when we first meet her, and soon after, she makes the unilateral decision of moving them out to a cabin in the woods for a fresh start. Leah is livid that her mother had not discussed it with her, but even more so when her mother suggests that she transfer to a nearer school, since that would mean losing touch with the friends she hangs out with – most notably her bestie Janice (Chloe Rose) and almost-boyfriend Aaron (Eric Osbourn).

After a particularly heated exchange where her mother callously says she wishes she could change up Leah’s face so it wouldn’t remind her of her late husband, Leah performs a ritual to summon the evil spirit to kill her mother. Whereas most other horros would take that as a cue to start unleashing the jump scares, MacDonald holds back on the genre tropes with surprising restraint, such that the demon is only felt as an unsettling presence and/or seen as a malevolent shadow in the first hour. Over that same period, things do get better between the two grief-stricken women, so much so that Leah ends up regretting what she had roused in a fit of anger and despair.

As nuanced and grounded as their thorny mother-daughter relationship may be, you’re bound to be expecting some sort of horror payoff by the third act, and this is also precisely where ‘Pyewacket’ falls short. Things only get really intense during the fleeting moments when Leah’s mother forces her way into Leah’s bedroom and the latter jumps out of the window to escape her clutches. Aside from that, the rest is just build-up, leading to an ambiguous ending that doesn’t want to decide whether there was some supernatural entity all along or if it were all just the culmination of Leah’s increasingly fragile mental state.

Still, against a tide of demonic horror films each trying to top the other in excess, MacDonald’s refusal to yield to those temptations is highly commendable. By investing in character, MacDonald builds a strong emotional core that anchors his film from start to finish, aided by strong performances from his two lead actresses. How much you’re willing to accept a film that grounds its horrors in reality will determine how much you take to ‘Pyewacket’, but equally, those looking for visceral scares simply need not apply. We wish there were a stronger gut punch at the end though, because as noble as its intentions of building a character-driven horror may be, we can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the time the credits rolled.

Movie Rating:

(Less a straight-out horror than a psychodrama, this slow-burn demonic thriller lacks a strong payoff to complement its solid character-driven setup)

Review by Gabriel Chong