‘The Dreadful’ review: Starved for satisfaction

Despite a reliable Marcia Gay Harden, The Dreadful suffers from a lack of imagination and cultural translation of the past to the present.

Writer/director Natasha Kermani hints to her audience with the title that they may want to skip The Dreadful, a reimagining of a Shin Buddhist parable of the bride scaring mask or mask with flesh attached. This inspired the Japanese film, The Hole (or Onibaba, which means “Demon Hag”) and was set in the fifteenth century.

In Kermani’s version, Anne (Sophie Turner) and her mother-in-law, Morwen (Marcia Gay Harden), are barely surviving and waiting for Seamus (Laurence O’Fuarain), Anne’s husband to come. His friend Jago (Kit Harington) returns without him, which creates division between the two women. Will Anne be able to continue to follow God and not be tempted to fall under the sway of either Morwen’s desperation and hunger or Jago’s sexual temptation?

The Dreadful will make you question whether Turner or Harington are actually good actors or extremely attractive with beautiful accents. Turner plays Anne as a spacey saint who gets easily frightened when she envisions Seamus returning home, sees demons when she feels guilty, or listens to Morwen’s tales of fiery damnation.

A stark miscasting.

The emotions that Turner projects on her face don’t convey her character’s mindset and often make the true believer seem dim. Let’s give her some grace and also blame Kermani for sanitizing the Japanese tale too much and making Anne more blameless than her counterpart in the original tale. Kermani tries to make Anne into a saint, complete with brandishing crosses to help people and resisting (some) of her baser desires.

Harington also gets a strike. Jago is supposed to be a character with suspect motives. Harington plays him more like the guy on the corner trying to spit game at some chick going to the store. His accent sounds as if he’s doing a Christian Bale impression acting as a working-class stiff. As undeniably attractive as he is, his performance doesn’t paint the picture of Anne’s true love, which is necessary to not write him off instantly as a furtive scammer. The actors publicly protest that they hated their romance scenes, and Kermani films them in such a decorous way that makes the entire project feel pointless. The director has no chemistry between the two to work with, so why make them love interests if it makes for the most tepid affair ever? Either Kermani’s finger is not on the pulse of her audience, or she’s oblivious to statistics.

Fortunately Harden is always great, and while her accent needs work, she makes Morwen into a terrifying figure who could jump into a time machine and fit quite comfortably in either Les Misérables or Sweeney Todd. Morwen is no dummy; Her escalation from petty theft to murder is credible in Harden’s hands even if Kermani struggles with pacing. Someone make an appointment for Harden to see a chiropractor because she carried this movie on her back. At least a gift certificate for a massage.

Get on with it.

The Dreadful is embedded with stale themes of younger women needing to distrust older women, older women as innately terrifying and covetous, and a woman’s greatest desire is to have a baby. Hey, maybe, but considering the first act consists of Anne and Morwen barely able to feed themselves, a third mouth would be stressful.

If The Dreadful feels like one big act, it’s because Kermani never presents these people as normal for long. It may have been wiser to start showing Seamus and Anne in love together before he goes to war. Morwen’s bloodlust makes Seamus’ story arc seem obvious. Kermani had the same problem in Abraham’s Boys; It’s an uneven horror movie because of her inclination to make the supernatural ambiguous. Are characters hysterical or is something really happening? Is the homicidal mother the horror part of the story?

It would have been enough, but Kermani never teases the possibility that Morwen wouldn’t kill Anne in a fit of rage, yet expects viewers to believe that Morwen wants Anne to live. In the original, there’s a practical reason that Kermani abandons to make Anne into a goody two-shoes. Another possibility is that Morwen doesn’t want Anne to fall for Jago’s sweet talking and end up stuck in a worse situation, but then that would mean antinatalism, which Kermani appears to be averse to.

Considering that Jago and Morwen are fighting over Anne, Kermani could’ve included a sapphic theme to explain Morwen’s possessiveness and unwillingness to kill Anne, but Kermani never entertains it. They start off the film extremely close. Anne even feeds Morwen like a baby bird. Instead, Morwen is the narcissistic, emotionally immature mother (-in-law) who refuses to let Anne be her own person and grow up and just wants to control her without any discernible benefit except company and chewing.  In the original, the mother-in-law is more attracted to Jago’s counterpart, but he rejects her. Morwen becomes a sexless monster in this version.

The bottom line.

Kermani is a better director than writer. When Morwen becomes a walking, talking jump scare coupled with the majestic scenery, it feels as if The Dreadful could develop into a grand movie with a lot of promise. Well, feelings are not facts. Kermani doesn’t flesh out this world enough or create credible characters. It feels like a missed opportunity to expand on the evils of war or how anyone could go astray if desperate enough. Kermani does well when Morwen is seething with fury every time they’re feeding a man because it’s what societal norms require, but they barely have food for themselves. Harden makes the desperation visceral, and other than drooling over the Game of Thrones alum, The Dreadful does not have much going for it.

The Dreadful is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Lionsgate. Read more articles by Sarah G. Vincent here.