Pyewacket / Adam MacDonald (2017)
You can't always take back the words you say. And you can't always understand the people you love. Leah Reyes learns this lesson in the hardest possible way in 2017's Pyewacket. Most of us can remember being a teenager, not having the best understanding of the adult world. Disagreeing with our parents. Arguing with them. Cursing them.
Okay, but not literally. In Pyewacket, writer and director Adam MacDonald tells the story of a teenage girl who takes things too far and isn't able to recover. Leah Reyes (Nicole Muñoz), mourning the recent death of her father, lives alone with her mother, Laurie (The Walking Dead's Laurie Holden). They're clearly bonded, but going through this together. Leah has developed an interest in the occult and witchcraft. Laurie feels they need to start fresh and decides to move the two of them to remote house in the woods. No, not that house. Or that one. Leah's frustration leads to a violent confrontation with her mother.
In the aftermath, Leah finds a ritual in one of her occult books. Blaming her mother for uprooting her life, and not understanding her pain, she performs a genuine ritual to summon a demonic entity known as Pyewacket to come and kill her mother. It's not trivial. The ritual requires a lock of hair and other personal items of her mother's. Almost immediately, Leah regrets it and begins to rebuild her relationship with her mother.
But the ritual can't simply be stopped. While the relationship heals, Leah notices unsettling signs that something is coming for her mother. Where Pyewacket succeeds is in blurring the line between what could be a simple monster movie or monkey's paw horror tale into something deeper.
"Pyewacket can take many forms, so don't trust your lying eyes."
The story on the page is as described above. Laurie is played as unstable, and unreliable. She's navigating loss and trying to chart the course for her family and her changing role within it. Leah's teenage angst and grief are a part of tension, but aren't overdone. It's not saccharine After School Special stuff. The strength of the story comes from the balance of the two characters and the ways MacDonald keeps viewers off balance. Is Laurie losing it? Or is Leah interpreting that? Or imagining it? Or having a vision of something else occupying her mother's body?
It's never exactly clear. Leah is navigating the consequences of her actions alone. She has a mother, a friend, a shop owner who can see she needs help but can't or won't fully commit. She's smart enough to know she's in trouble, but too naive to understand the consequences. She's isolated, but so is her mother. And they're both desperate for the other to help.
Then, there's the demonic force known as Pyewacket. Like The Babadook and Hereditary, it remains unclear that the entity and the horror here, may be in Leah's head. That ambiguity represents the boundary between thinking something and knowing something. MacDonald represents this as two separate spaces, the home and the ritual area in the woods. But the idea that the evil is imagined is slowly removed as Leah continues seeing signs, and investigating. The evil it seems is entering the house. Leaving messes. Dirt. Dread. A shape at the foot of her bed.
She tracks down an author of occult books (James McGowan) and asks for help. He advises her that she needs to try to undo the curse before Pyewacket arrives. To do this, he says, she has to return to the site and repeat the ritual backwards.
By the time Pyewacket arrives in whatever shape MacDonald finally lets it take, the question the film has been asking all along isn't really "is the monster real." It's whether Leah can undo the damage of a single reckless moment before it costs her the very relationship she was trying to save. That's the film's cleverest trick: it dresses a very ordinary teenage regret, the thing you said that you didn't mean, in the clothing of a monkey's paw horror story, then refuses to let you tell the difference between guilt, haunting and malice. Whether or not the ending fully earns its ambiguity, Pyewacket understands something a lot of "evil in the woods" movies don't: the scariest part was never the demon. It was believing, even for a second, that you meant it.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
Cowering in the car. Afraid of what she's done and been experiencing, Leah asks her friend Janice (Chloe Rose) to sleep over at their new home in the woods. After an intense night of activity, Leah and her mother find Janice has left the house. They look for her and find her cowering in the car, unable to explain what happened to her. Janice is presented as emo, and maybe more hardcore than Leah. Her terror is a signal that Leah is in real trouble.
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My Letterboxd review