PLOT SUMMARY: Ben believes that a witch is possessing the neighbor and kidnapping and feeding on children.
It’s raining. There are toys still outside in the playground, getting wet and dirty.
You will find yourself asking questions: why weren’t they picked up? If the kids didn’t, why did the parents leave them out to get dirty?
These questions are answered in the second half of the movie. Then it all makes sense, even this opening credit scene.
The Wretched is another movie about the dangerous creatures lurking in the woods. The woods are after all dark and deep, a place horror writers can make their playground and invent creatures that will terrify the characters in their story. I’ve done it too with one of my stories.
THE WRETCHED Movie Plot
We are taken back 35 years ago when a babysitter enters the house. She doesn’t find the kid in the house and goes downstairs to see someone sitting on a chair. She finds kid shoes dangling and is horrified when the creature, who looks like a woman, turns around, bone creaks and all.
It’s a monster!
The babysitter flees toward the stairs, finds a man standing atop who shuts the door on her face. The girl screams. We are shown a door with an upside-down triangle with the edges coming out. Looks like a basic drawing of a goat.
The next scene shows a boy on the bus, waking up from a dream of being drowned. The caption states five days ago, while you will find yourself asking: five days ago from what? What happened?
An old woman turns around and tells him that he’s quite an artist.
The boy, Ben, looks down at his cast and can’t understand why the old woman was so impressed with just a scribble of black marker.
He gets down and goes to meet his father Liam. A folded photograph on the refrigerator of just Liam and Ben reveals that the other part of it contains the picture of the mother. We are made to understand that the couple is divorcing.
Ben doesn’t reveal to his father how he really broke his arm while playing Connect 4. His father hardly pays attention to the game.
The next morning, Ben is given a job by his father who is the supervisor at the marina. He has to assist in teaching kids how to sail. He meets with his colleague, Mallory who jibes about nepotism.
Ben barely hears her as he eyes a girl going off on a boat with her obnoxious rich friends.
He meets with Dillon, the neighbour’s son and agrees to give him lessons. Dillon’s mother Abbie takes him for a walk in the woods one day and goes away to relieve herself.
Dillon wanders around and hears his mother call him. He sees a big tree and an opening near the roots where the voice emerges from. When Dillon takes too much time to go to the tree, the voice becomes aggressive. Just then Dillon’s mother jumps at him from behind and spooks him.
Abbie and her husband Ty have a baby as well and when the kids go off to sleep, they have a private moment with open curtains. Ben uses his binoculars to spy on them.
He’s still peeved at his father for kissing his girlfriend Sara publicly. But Ben soon realizes he must behave maturely and asks his father to set up a dinner with Sara so he can meet with her.
When he’s told to fetch gluten-free dinner rolls, Mallory invites him to a party where he meets with the girl and her obnoxious friends again. They play never have I ever and Ben is made to drink since he’s the only one who broke his arm.
He gets drunk and shares a moment with Mallory where he reveals he broke his arm when breaking into the neighbors home to steal his drugs. Then when climbing back in, he had hurt his arm. Mallory, in turn, reveals her fascination for candy and Hannah Montana to the point she wore an orange wig. They almost kiss but Ben instead pukes on her.
After getting cleaned up, he roams around and is invited into the pool by the girl who removes his trunks and tells him to close his eyes. It’s an obvious prank and Ben is made to come out of the pool naked as her friends tease him.
Mallory sees Ben and goes away angrily. Back home, Ben is reprimanded by his father to skip dinner and doesn’t care that his son too had a miserable time.
He cries out that Sara is just some stupid bimbo and then finds her still in the house, not too happy to be insulted.
There is a shot of the table where four places are set, and you wonder if there is a guest missing. Did Sara bring someone with her? Spoiler alert: there is another guest but more on that later.
Meanwhile, when Abbie has returned from the woods, she had hit a buck and brought it home to impress her husband with her hunting and cutting up skills. All she manages to do is spill all the animal’s organs on her driveway.
She then leaves it as is, blood and organs everywhere. At night, a hand creeps from under the buck and tears it open. Something monstrous has just emerged from the buck.
In the morning, the flowers are all wilting. Abbie goes to sleep and when she wakes up to check the cam and see if her baby is fine, finds him missing. She goes into the nursery and finds a blanket wound around a lump. She unravels it and finds tree branches. She hears a crunching sound, then a pool of blood. She looks down and is immediately pulled in.
The next day, when Ben returns home, he finds Dillon in his house. He says that his mother has been behaving weirdly. Abbie turns up at the house and demands to see her son.
Ben lies about Dillon being there to which Abbie calls him a stupid boy. Ty appears and Dillon goes running to his father. Abbie glares at Ben before returning. Instead of shorts and tops, she’s begun wearing flowing, low-cut tops.
Later, Ben sees Abbie walking toward the woods with a child. He begins to chase her but his father stops him, scolding him for getting into a fight. Ben claims the other boys started it after he threw trash into their boats, but Liam wants his son to behave like a good boy.
The next day, at sailing lessons, Dillon doesn’t show up. Ben goes to the neighbor’s house and Ty seems confused about who is asking about. Clearly, he doesn’t remember his own baby or son.
Ben is perplexed when he sees Abbie whispering in Ty’s ear, causing it to bleed. Ben decides to investigate this online and finds a legend of a witch who uses people’s skin like clothes and feeds on children. Suspecting Abbie has been possessed by a witch, he investigates her cellar and finds photos of the family with their eyes scratched out. He also finds a picture of Mallory and her sister and realizes they might be the next victim.
Ben calls Mallory, but she has no recollection of ever having a sister. Her sister is abducted and pulled into the tree.
Ben thinks about calling the police but they are already at his home to talk to him for breaking into their neighbor’s cellar.
He’s in the kitchen with Sara and notices flowers wilting. Realizing the witch has taken over his father’s girlfriend, Ben uses a knife to defend himself and cuts her arm.
Sara becomes her normal self again just as Liam arrives. Ben is arrested and thrown into the cop’s car. He keeps telling his father to check in the neighbor’s cellar for the truth but his father isn’t going to agree to it in front of the cops.
Sara meanwhile whispers in the cop's ear and makes it bleed. The cop is entranced and drives Ben to the beach to drown him.
This was what happened five days after Ben got down from the bus.
Ben manages to fend off his attacks with the help of a dog who in the introductory scene had stopped Ben from stealing change at the grocery store. The cop pulls a gun at him. But the cop also has an inner fight with himself as he knows he shouldn’t be shooting teenagers. He shoots himself instead.
THE WRETCHED Ending Explained with Spoilers!
Meanwhile, Liam decides to trespass at Abbie’s house. He finds her and her husband dead and is attacked by Sara when Ben appears just in time with a gun. He shouts Sara and the witch climbs out.
Ben takes Liam with him just as their house is burning. The family pictures begin to burn and that is when Ben remembers he had a little brother Nathan.
He remembers it was his little brother who was drawing on his cast that the old woman had commented on. He recalls playing connect 4 with him and also that he was in the family picture as well. He was the fourth person who was supposed to be having dinner with Sara as well.
His father and mother remember Nathan but never talk to Ben about him. They all live in the same house but only Ben is made to forget Nathan. How is it that Nathan never talked to Ben? Did he become invisible to Ben? Was it when Abbie turned up at their house that she enchanted Ben and made him forget? Was Nathan the kid Ben saw Abbie taking into the woods with?
Probably yes. But all this still doesn’t explain how Liam never talked to Ben about Nathan and if the witch’s power also makes the kids she’s going to abduct turn invisible to certain family members.
Anyway, Ben goes to the woods, just as he receives a call from Mallory demanding to know where her sister is. Ben finds the tree in the woods and goes in.
He finds the witch feeding on a child.
There are more kids hidden and Ben just about manages to fight off the witch and save Nathan and Mallory’s sister.
The witch seemed to feed on kids instantly, yet she kept Ben’s and Mallory’s kid stored. Conveniently.
The witch chases Ben but Liam arrives in his car and pins her against the tree.
Ben is happy to save his brother and that his time in this town is over.
Liam has a broken leg and his ex-wife is happy to drop him off at his brother’s.
Liam goes to Mallory who gives him a flower saying it’s a gift from her little sister as thank you for saving her life.
Liam kisses Mallory and runs before she asks for commitment. In the car, he smells the flower and realizes it is plastic.
He wonders if a witch was behind gifting him fake flowers.
Mallory is seen taking kids on a boat. She’s all alone with three kids in the middle of nowhere. She stares strangely out at nothing.
It is implied she’s the witch. A smart witch who knows her presence causes flowers to decay.
She’s now going to gift fake flowers to everyone.
The movie is a decent time pass. If only the plot holes could be filled. I get the need to end horror movies with a cliffhanger in case the movie becomes a success and a sequel may be ordered, but at least it should be believable.
Just how did the witch survive? Is there a way to defeat her? Does she possess people or kill them and wear their skin?
Most importantly, when children disappear, does only their family forget them or everyone else as well?
Ben remembered Dillon even though his own father didn’t. When these kids disappear, what do the schools do? Keep marking them absent?
More questions are bound to pop up the more you think about this movie.
Scare scale: 3/5
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