Pyewacket (2017)

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) I keep saying it in vain: If you’re a small-scale filmmaker on a budget, the best thing you can do to distinguish yourself is to find a fascinating premise that works within your limits. Do like Canadian writer-director Adam MacDonald, who makes good use of an isolated rural location (and a few small-town sequences) to deliver a tight, memorable, somewhat original story. As Pyewacket begins, our protagonist is a teenage girl whose mercurial widowed mother decides to move far away from her school, friends and other things taken for granted. Needless to say, this doesn’t go over well, and before long our supernatural-obsessed protagonist is busy placing a ritual death curse on her mom. This works too well—by the time they reconcile a few moments later, our protagonist realizes what she’s done and her objectives change to undo the curse. While there would be comic potential for such a story, Pyewacket keeps things dramatic, and in doing so has a few things to say about complex mother/daughter relationships, about being stuck in small towns, and about guilt. The film sustains a rational “all in her head” explanation for the less imaginative viewers, but is far more satisfying to genre fans as an exploration of occult meddling that goes wrong. MacDonald is also able to build an atmosphere of dread that benefits from the low production values. Best of all, it does all of this with a (very) low six-figure budget, getting a lot of bang for its (Canadian) buck. There are a few things that ring false (including much of the climax), but the result is pretty good—another decent entry in the Canadian horror filmography, and a bit of CanCon that I won’t mind seeing rerun on cable channels for years.