In The Dreadful, a mysterious knight stalks the land—he’s enormous, clad head to toe in fearsome black armor, riding a white horse, emerging from a dark mist to stand around ominously in the distance or to cut the head off a passerby. He’s obviously a metaphor—oh, no, wait… somebody killed him.
OK, maybe not a metaphor? Well, he sort of still is, but not how you think at first, and this is part of why The Dreadful struggles to tell its story in a truly satisfying way: it’s trying to cram in too many ideas and we’re just never really sure what we should be paying attention to.
The film takes place during the War of the Roses in 15th-century England, and it stars Sophie Turner, who right away makes good use of the thousand-yard stare she perfected while playing Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones. Her husband hasn’t returned from the war and she lives with her mother-in-law, a mumbly—and kind of delightful—Marcia Gay Harden, who has a tendency to rob and murder travelers so she’ll have money to eat things other than rotten onions. She coerces Turner into taking part in the murders, while also occasionally talking about a vague curse. Meanwhile, Kit Harington washes up on shore, and we have a little Game of Thrones reunion as he plays Turner’s childhood friend who went to war with Turner’s husband, but things went sideways and he’s the only one who came back.
And now I should probably mention this movie is a remake of the famous Japanese horror film Onibaba, or, well, it’s an adaptation of the same Buddhist parable Onibaba was based on, but let’s be honest, it’s a remake of Onibaba. There’s no point in comparing this movie to one of history’s great horror films, that wouldn’t be fair, but if you know the Japanese version then that might tip you off to where this is headed, although you’ll still be surprised by how little setup there is, which is, again, because we’re too busy trying to figure out what we’re supposed to pay attention to, especially with all the curse talk and a brief and very modern crisis of faith. The filmmaking doesn’t help, with its distorted lenses and loud, pervasive music that never really help us understand where to focus, although I give the movie a lot of credit for creating a world in which nearly everything around Turner is menacing— including Harrington as her new love interest— which is, we can imagine, reflective of the experience a woman like Turner might actually have in such a place. I’m not sure this was intentional, but it’s still there. And the movie’s last 20 minutes do start to get bizarre enough that we’re entertained, but what they really do is hint at a much more interesting movie that’s hiding underneath all that extra weight.
The Dreadful is on VOD February 20th.
