The Wretched, or, Good Salt Circles Make Good Neighbors

The Wretched is the kind of movie you’d stumble onto when channel surfing late at night, watch for a few minutes, and then get engrossed enough to watch until the end. It’s an unrated independent movie with a modest budget1Just over a million dollars according to imdb, which a lot of people call “low budget,” so I guess I just don’t know how much movies cost that feels like it punches above its weight and ends up being pretty fun.

It’s about a teenage boy whose parents are going through a divorce, so he travels to stay with his dad in a small resort town on the water. He deals with teen stuff like having to get a job, trying to make friends with the local kids, having a crush on a co-worker, struggling with the divorce and his dad’s new girlfriend, and also he suspects something evil is going on with the family next door.

I didn’t stumble onto it; I kept hearing the title casually mentioned along with other horror movies, so I finally decided to go in blind without hearing anything else about it.2I watched it on Kanopy, but I believe it’s also available on Netflix. The piece of trivia that always gets associated with it is that it beat Avatar‘s record of most weeks at first in the box office… because it was released in 2020, when nobody was releasing movies to theaters. It might have also gotten a slight bump recently because the lead actress is the voice of the main character in Hoppers.

To me, it felt indie but not low budget. The effects and make-up work is pretty good, there are some surprisingly gruesome scares starting with the opening scene, and it’s darker and a little more intense than I would’ve expected. It did feel rough, though, cutting between storylines in a way that was disorienting; I found myself often asking “wait, who’s that person? Whose house are we in now? Is this a different scene?” And it’s entirely a me problem, but a few of the actors look just similar enough that you can get confused if you’re not paying close attention. (Maybe if you’re not trying to do something else while watching it, you won’t fall into the “old man thinks all dark-haired women are the same character” trap).

I liked it overall, but I didn’t think I had anything that interesting to say about it. Until I read reactions online, where a lot of people seemed to be giving their most willfully uninteresting and incurious takes. To explain what I mean requires spoilers after this point.

I read multiple complaints about the movie falling apart at the end, or having “huge plot holes.” And there are indeed some issues with it; in my opinion, the biggest one is having the dad show up at exactly the right place at the right time, even though he’d have no idea where the kids ran off to.

Also, the ending didn’t land as well as I suspect they intended it to. It’s easy to tell what they were going for, but none of the scenes really sold it. It was more of a “well, if you say so,” than an “oh my god!”

But none of that was enough to ruin the movie, because its biggest act 3 reveal — our main character has a younger brother he’d been made to forget! — was pulled off so well. And it’s irritating to be reminded of the internet’s tendency to call it a “plot hole” whenever a movie tries to do something unconventional.

I hadn’t seen it coming at all. And better than that, the quick “we gave you all the clues!” flashbacks worked perfectly. (Especially right after seeing Saltburn, where its flashbacks seemed ham-fisted and unnecessary to me).

So often at the end of a detective story, we get a recap of all the clues we were supposed to have picked up on, and it’s rarely satisfying. Because The Wretched isn’t a detective story, I wasn’t primed to look for clues to some mystery — other than the most immediate one of “what exactly is this thing that’s attacking this family?” — so everything else just felt like a weird non sequitur. Weird enough to stick in my mind, but not so much that I tried to make sense of it at the time.

The woman on the bus saying “you’re quite the artist.” Our protagonist saying “it’s just us.” The dad saying “I love the sound of that.”3I didn’t notice, but someone on the internet pointed it out, that there were four place settings at the dinner our protagonist missed. All of it just felt like weird mood-setting for a horror movie.

What’s even cooler, though, is how it’s a case of The Wretched playing with point-of-view and perspective for effect, in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from a movie like this. And I wouldn’t have thought much about it if I hadn’t read a Reddit post complaining about it.

The complaint was that it didn’t make sense unless the witch had cast a spell on our protagonist before the movie had started, but how is that even possible since she couldn’t have gotten the picture until much later, and so on. And sure, if you need a movie to be literal and strictly chronological, it doesn’t make sense. I even tried a thought experiment to see if I could find the point of the “switch,” where we went from seeing his memory of events to seeing the “actual” events. Maybe his premonition of being drowned on the bus? And I could never make it all neatly line up.

But of course, that’s not a “plot hole.” It’s the point. The movie’s structured to make the reveal have the same impact on the audience as it does on the protagonist at that moment.

We never question whether the movie itself is being an unreliable narrator. After all, there’s already enough going on in this movie, with a shape-shifting witch going around mind-controlling men and eating children. So when we see the reveal, we feel the same disorientation that the protagonist does at the idea that we’ve completely forgotten that a person even existed.

It’s a neat trick to think about, because it calls into question all of these hard fast rules of cinematic storytelling that we just take for granted. We assume that we’re either in third person omniscient mode unless we’re shown otherwise. We get clues when the movie’s shifted to a certain character’s point of view. We assume that cuts are going to skip over a reasonable and understandable amount of time and space, and we’re seeing everything chronologically unless told otherwise.

Movies don’t play with that enough. And when they do, it’s usually the entire point of the movie, like Memento, or Shutter Island. I really liked seeing something that would’ve otherwise worked just fine as a straightforward take on Rear Window or Fright Night, decide to throw in a flourish to make the audience feel like they’d been under a spell themselves.

1
Just over a million dollars according to imdb, which a lot of people call “low budget,” so I guess I just don’t know how much movies cost

2
I watched it on Kanopy, but I believe it’s also available on Netflix.

3
I didn’t notice, but someone on the internet pointed it out, that there were four place settings at the dinner our protagonist missed.

1 Just over a million dollars according to imdb, which a lot of people call “low budget,” so I guess I just don’t know how much movies cost

2 I watched it on Kanopy, but I believe it’s also available on Netflix.

3 I didn’t notice, but someone on the internet pointed it out, that there were four place settings at the dinner our protagonist missed.