The Dark and the Wicked

Louise and Michael return to their family's isolated Texas farm when their father is placed on hospice care, dying and largely unresponsive. Their mother meets them with fear rather than comfort — agitated, warning them they shouldn't have come, that something is here. She has been writing in her journal compulsively, filling pages with a single phrase over and over.

The mother kills herself that night in the barn. The family fractures, struggling to process a death no one anticipated alongside a father who is barely conscious. A hospice nurse and a local priest both begin to behave strangely when they visit, as though something on the property is reaching into them too.

The entity — never fully shown, experienced as an oppressive dread, visions of the dead, and figures that wear familiar faces — begins targeting Louise and Michael in earnest. The priest, in a moment of possession, attacks Michael before killing himself. The hospice nurse, similarly overtaken, dies violently.

Michael is killed. Louise, alone now with a father who finally dies, tries to leave but cannot escape what has attached itself to her. The film ends with Louise sitting in the dark, overwhelmed. There is no resolution, no salvation, no help coming. The evil endures. The family is gone.