The Wretched

Ben arrives at his father Liam's lakeside marina property for the summer with a broken wrist and a family fractured by his parents' separation. He picks up shifts at the dock and gravitates toward Mallory, a local girl who works nearby. The neighbour family — Abbie, her husband, and their young son Dillon — occupies the house next door. They seem ordinary until Abbie begins to change. She is absent from conversations in a way that reads as possession, moving through her own life with the hollowed focus of someone who has been replaced.

An ancient witch, predatory and patient, has taken up residence beneath Abbie's skin. The witch feeds on children and uses a method more disturbing than violence: she erases them from memory. Dillon disappears. Then no one can remember that Dillon ever existed — not his father, not the neighbours, not anyone who knew him. Ben begins to investigate. He finds evidence in the hollow beneath the ancient tree in the neighbours' yard: children have been taken here over what appears to be decades.

Ben tries to convince his father and others, but the forgetting is absolute. Anyone connected to the witch's victims has no memory of them at all. He realises Mallory has been taken. He has no memory of her either — but a photograph on his phone remains, proof she existed. He uses it to anchor himself against the erasure and track the witch.

He rescues Dillon and the other children from beneath the tree. The witch, wearing Abbie's body, is destroyed. Dillon is found. Mallory is gone too long — she cannot be recovered.

The summer ends. Ben drives away. In the last shot, a neighbour further down the lakeshore opens a basement door and descends into the dark. Something wet and patient waits below the floorboards.