Review: ‘Wild Eyed and Wicked’ genre bends horror and fantasy

Exploring trauma in horror is a longstanding tradition. From Don’t Look Now to Daniel Isn’t Real and The Invisible Man (2020), deep wounds throb in the oozing center of many of the genre’s best stories. Perhaps, there’s nothing more to say on the subject, but a new film from Gravitas Ventures delivers a genre-bending exploration of inherited trauma and breaking those chains. Writer/director Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood’s Wild Eyed and Wicked lives within the same space as those films and offers a strong lead performance in Molly Kunz’s Lily Pierce. The film glistens as a reflective timepiece about a young woman’s navigation through her pain and rage – all bottled up as a drama woven with fantasy/horror elements.

It’s been 20 years since the death of her mother Silvia (Stefanie Estes). The memory still haunts Lily, who’s convinced a supernatural figure is out to get her. She even sleeps with a Glock hidden under her pillow… just in case. Estranged from her father Gregory (Michael X. Sommers), Lily forged her own life with her girlfriend Willow (Claire Saunders), an accomplished architect who gives Lily a sense of stability and companionship.

When Gregory calls Lily out of the blue, he invites her over to rummage through her mother’s things – trinkets and other personal items that keep him trapped in the past. In doing so, Lily must finally confront her father’s role in her mother’s death and how he’s never been there when she needed him most. But this time promises to be different. Gregory has changed. He’s given up booze, and time has made him see the error of his ways. He can’t alter what happened, but he can be different. Lily begrudgingly gives him another chance, and through the wildly creepy events of the film, they come to a loving place.

When Lily shuffles through boxes of her mother’s belongings, Gregory shares a wooden box of erratically written letters that signal something far more sinister at work. It’s through these letters that Lily draws closer to the truth about what happened and how her mother failed to survive. But time is ticking before the unseen entity snatches up her loved ones and pulls them to the darker yonder.

Foxwood supplies these sturdy emotional underpinnings to give the story high stakes and strong thematic arcs. With cinematographers Matheus Bastos and Eyal Bau Cohen in tow, he tangles both crispness and moodiness to the camera work, lighting, and color temperatures. He plays in shadows, taunting the mind to see things that aren’t really there. The audience peers through Lily’s eyes in these moments, decorated with glowing yellow eyes and jagged hands, to deliver some of the film’s most unsettling scenes.

With emphasis on drama, Foxwood peppers in the horror and fantasy as accents, rather than the driving forces. As such, horror fiends might leave their experience wanting far more than they were offered. Wild Eyed and Wicked, which reaches its climax in an epic fight between Lily (suited up in armor) and the otherworldly being, might be skimpy on the horror but still arrives as quite the showpiece for Kunz.

Wild Eyed and Wicked is out now on VOD.

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