- Directed by Adam MacDonald
- Written by Adam MacDonald
- Stars Laurie Holden, Nicole Munoz, Chloe Rose
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 27 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bbtAKNi_j8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Is it witchery or madness? Or maybe a little of both. This movie will have you wondering. Set in a parallel reality where people are forced to attend high school into their twenties, the angst is understandably palpable. It builds a nice foundation of characters in the first half, then climbs to a heck of an ending.
Synopsis
Leah Reyes is a high school student who lives with her mother, who is a depressed alcoholic. Leah’s father died some time ago, and her mother is struggling to cope with it. She goes to a book signing and picks up a book on occult rituals. She hangs out with Janice, Aaron, and Rob, her three best friends. When she gets home, her mother springs on her that she’s sold the house and they’re moving up north. Leah will leave all her friends behind, and they’re all she has. She takes it badly.
Her mother shows her the new place, and it’s an isolated cabin out in the woods. Her mother compromises by offering to drive and pick her up from school every day, an hour’s drive each way. But her friends do things after school, and she can no longer go along. After school, Leah and her mother do little but fight and argue.
Leah goes out in the woods and screams, “I wish you were dead!” Coming to the conclusion that that isn’t going to do anything, she picks up her occult book and decides to do a ritual instead. She goes out to the woods, does the ritual, and then calls upon “Pyewacket” to manifest. When she gets home, her mother apologizes and they make up. It’s not like Leah did anything she can’t take back, right?
The next morning, there are dirty footprints inside the back door, but that’s all. That night, she hears clomping in the attic. There’s nothing up there. Leah starts to regret doing the ritual, even though she hasn’t actually seen anything supernatural. That night, we do see the shadow of something roaming through the house.
The next morning, Leag wakes up out in the woods, in the place where she did her ritual, with blood all over her hands. She goes to school and tells her friends what she did, and they think she’s terrible for doing that; they think Leah is going to deserve whatever happens. They are surprisingly unsupportive, but Janice offers to spend the night at Leah’s house tonight.
Janice wants to see the place where the ritual happened, but it’s dark out. They use her phone for light and go out into the woods. Janice goes into a trance and wanders off into the darkness. She’s just messing with Leah though, and soon the pair go back home to sleep. The next morning, Janice is gone. They find her hiding, hysterical, in the car outside in the morning.
At school later, Janice isn’t there and won’t return Leah’s texts. Leah decides to contact the author of the occult book and sends him an email. He sends back that he wants to talk to her tomorrow after school.
“A dark spirit like Pyewacket is very manipulative,” he explains. He says that with Black Magic, all the evil will be thrown back at her, unless she does the exact same ritual in the same place, only in reverse. She has to do it before it gets to her mother.
Leah gathers her materials and goes back out to the woods to start the ritual. She finds her mother’s dead body out there first. Leah calls 911, and runs back to the house. But wait, mother is there at the house. No, it’s Pyewacket. Or is it?
Paranoia sets in, and Leah no longer trusts her mother. Is she real or is it Pyewacket? She calls Aaron to come get her. Oh yes, it’s Pyewacket. Leah climbs out the window and runs to hide in the attic as the demon chases after her on all fours. But someone who looks like her mother comes in. Her mother, or Pyewacket, takes the knife away from her and wants an explanation. Her mother acts like she thinks she’s suicidal; hence the knife.
Leah goes outside and siphons off a bucket of gas out of the car. She goes into her mother’s bedroom and pours it all over her. She burns Pyewacket to death. Aaron finally arrives and takes Leah to the hospital. The police want some answers. No, her mother’s body isn’t out in the woods. And suppose you tell us just how did that fire start?
Commentary
An occult ritual to kill your mother because you’re a spoiled brat seems a bit excessive, but at least she was able to follow instructions; that’s more than most high schoolers can say. The ritual itself takes a good bit of screen time and seems fairly involved; I don’t know if it was based on some real ritual or not, but it definitely seemed believably realistic.
I hesitate to call this another “slow burn” but it does spend a lot more time on character development than it does on horror or action. Other than Leah’s ritual, not very much actually happens in the first hour, but it never gets boring. Once it gets going, the suspense and uncertainty work really well.