Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!
I like folk horror. There’s always a sense, at least to me, of people meddling in the primal evils of the world that feels like it is touching on just how small we are in the universe. Touching on the deeper, darker underlying horror of the world is akin to our own insignificance in the universe. Calling up primordial horrors, at least to me, is no different in terms of story structure to films like The Vast of Night or Aniara, just with a more Lovecraftian vibe. When I come across a movie where people are performing rituals in the middle of nowhere, I’m going to be interested, even if the movie isn’t highly acclaimed. Thus, we have the oddly named Pyewacket.
Leah Reyes (Nicole Muñoz) is a high school student who leans a bit darker in the things that garner her interest. She’s become increasingly interested in the occult since the death of her father, an event that has pushed her away from her mother (Laurie Holden). The final straw for Leah happens when her mother decides that the house they are living in is too filled with memories of her husband, and she decides to move them to a remote house, away from Leah’s friends. The fact that Leah can’t drive makes this feel like both a prison and a punishment.
Leah’s reaction to this is precisely what you’d expect from an angsty teen with interest in witchcraft. She hunts through her books, finds a ritual to perform, and goes out in the woods to do it. In short, she decides to summon the demon Pyewacket to kill her mother. Shortly after, Leah and her mother bond with each other, and Leah regrets the ritual.
But the ritual has been performed, and the way that these things work is that once the ritual is done, the consequences are going to follow. Leah regrets the ritual, but that’s not going to matter to the demon that she has summoned. Leah starts to hear things in the house at night and finds piles of dirt in the house. One night, Leah is dragged from her bed and awakens in the forest, covered in blood. She tells her friends at school, and her friend Janice (Chloe Rose) agrees to spend the night to see what is happening.
The overnight stay does not go well. Leah and Janice spend some time in the forest and Janice acts oddly, but also claims she was just playing around before the two go home. But things change in the night, and when Leah and her mother wake up in the morning, they find that Janice has locked herself in the car outside, refuses to unlock the car, and also refuses to reenter the house. When Leah contacts a favorite author on the occult, he tells her that the only way to fix things is to perform the same ritual in reverse, but that Pyewacket will attempt to trick her—and she must not trust anyone until she has completed the ritual again.
Pyewacket is very much a slow burn film. Things build slowly until we realize that Janice has spent a terrified night in a car and Leah contacts the author. Once that happens, things spiral very quickly and we get to the ending that we’re sure we’re going to have. There aren’t a lot of ways that Pyewacket can go, and since modern movies are far more likely to be downbeat in the ending.
Where Pyewacket excels is in showing the descent into madness when it’s clear that the ritual has worked. Admittedly, how this is going to go is clear. Once we’re told that Leah can’t trust anything or anyone around her, there are going to be a number of things where Leah is going to get mixed signals, not knowing which to trust. And, just as expected, Leah is going to decide to trust some of those signals despite knowing that she shouldn’t. And while what happens is inevitable, it’s still surprising in a few ways.
Honestly, Pyewacket isn’t the kind of movie that is going to be a lot of people’s favorite movie, but it’s a solid entry in the folk horror genre. What it does well is exactly what folk horror should do well. It makes us feel like there’s something out there that doesn’t hate us or want to hurt us, but that doesn’t care about us, that lives by rules that we can’t comprehend.
Why to watch Pyewacket: Folk horror is cool.
Why not to watch: Slow burns don’t work for everyone.
