Fairytales are intended to give children weapons against the night. In Wild Eyed and Wicked, the fantasy-tinged horror from Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood, the lesson is that their protections remain powerful even as we become adults.
Wild Eyed and Wicked (which had its world premiere at last year’s Austin Film Festival) sends Molly Kunz into the metaphorical woods as Lily, a woman scarred by a devastating tragedy in her childhood and plagued by the shadows it left behind. Kunz was a highlight of the sweet but slim orphaned animals pic The Wolf and the Lion, and it’s very much the same with Wild Eyed and Wicked as she plays a woman who has been dealing with her demons so long that even when they materialize she’s barely shaken. They may, it’s clear, also be hallucinations so severe that she’s starting to hurt the people around her. And so she runs back to the family estate, to face her dark legacy and the absentee father (Sommers, gaunt and broken) that she feels failed both her and her mother (Estes).
Lily’s scars run deep and often rise to the surface, and Kunz gives her a curling, cavorting twist of pain and rage. Her performance makes Lily’s bitterness all the more relatable even as magical forces start to dance around her. She’s let down a little by the weaker parts of Foxwood as a director, exposed in the scenes in which Lily tries to have a normal life. The infrastructure of her burgeoning relationship with architect Willow (Saunders), and her attempts at having a friend (Ford-Conway as Liam, her fencing student) is supposed to give the audience reason to care about how she eventually heals. Yet those scenes feel superfluous – especially with the flashbacks to her mother. A medievalist who filled her daughter’s head with tales of chivalry and monsters, she’s far more intriguing and significant than those characters. Luckily, Foxwood’s strengths are in those darker narrative segments, and Kunz’s transformation from embittered daughter into a sword-wielding hero capable of vanquishing evil compliments his style.
The transformation is subtly done, but Foxwood makes the switch from trauma tragedy to action-horror seamless – a process assisted by the costume designs of Nadine Sondej-Robinson, subtly implying Lily as a fantasy heroine with some simple but effective choices. Equally, a golden hour training montage may be a hacky trope of the fantasy genre, but cinematographer Matheus Bastos uses its warmth to great effect, serving as a transition for both Lily’s relationship with her father and into the third act monster hunt. It’s a legitimate shame that the monster hunt is plagued by the digital camera murkiness that afflicts so many indie horrors: however, that’s offset by the sound design work of Roman Chimienti, Ryan Miller, and Jay Pellizzi, building the world through the birdsong that provides an intriguing, pastoral context for Lily’s quest.
However, Foxwood’s script gives some new life to the played-out subgenre of family ghosts as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. It’s not a complete or radical reinvention, but by quietly inserting symbolism and imagery that wouldn’t feel out of place in Excalibur or The Legend of Robin Hood, Foxwood gives a shining valor to Lily’s ride into battle with her ghosts.
This article appears in June 7 • 2024.
