The Unlit – Film Review

Following her mother’s death, a young woman named Claire Nash (Cassandra Magrath) returns home, only to find the town overshadowed by a mysterious darkness and steeped in rumors of a soul-stealing entity. A confrontation with a coven of witches is the only way to survive.

The Unlit, also known as Witches of Blackwood, has a premise that genuinely entices me – I don’t usually find witch stories super intriguing (with the exception of American Horror Story: Coven) but something about this story seemed different than the rest that plague the genre. I also love supporting and watching indie horror films because I know how hard it is to make a film and how much work gets put into it. When I was working on my horror film that never came to fruition, it didn’t take me long at all to realize “Wow, this is a lot trickier than I anticipated”.

And really, the technical elements of The Unlit are striking. It feels like a remarkably cold and unsettling film thanks to its cinematography by Paul Hughes and it utilizes lighting and shadows impressively well, but, sadly, it forgets to bring with it the most important element of any film – a good story. The Unlit has one of the dullest and unexplored scripts I’ve seen all year. For seventy-eight minutes, we follow characters that we end up learning next to nothing about, and for a film that bills itself as a deeply chilling horror, there are only about two or three scenes that can even remotely be considered horror.

The rest of The Unlit fails to impress as well. The film spends so much time with our lead character Claire exploring her hometown and talking to folks she knew back when she lived there and catching up, many of whom tell her unsettling stories of things that happened in the town. These stories are actually interesting to hear and we get a sense that this place is haunted and that Claire needs to tread carefully. You’d expect there to be a deeply riveting third act where Claire finally realizes the stories are true and has to come into conflict with something larger than life, but no.

Even the witchcraft elements here are tame and are almost completely unexplored. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the first forty-five to fifty minutes of this seventy-eight-minute film serve as build-up scenes. You pray that the ending would be one hell of a way to conclude the story, but it’s not. It’s extremely formulaic and doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen done hundreds of times before, and better.

But I don’t want to rag on this movie too much because while it is boring, there was clearly an effort put into it and I genuinely feel that if screenwriter Darren Markey spent a little more time making a few more drafts on this script, it could’ve been decent. Sadly, the final product ended up feeling so rushed and when the end credits rolled, I felt wholly empty inside and totally unmoved.

An excellent horror film should leave you feeling completely haunted and uncomfortable. Even though it’s only two years old, I will honestly never forget the time I went to go see Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse with my parents on opening night at our city’s theatre. We were the only ones in the theatre to sit back and bask in the crazy, deeply disturbing story that unfolded before our eyes.

When the final scene played out in front of us and the end credits rolled, I remember all three of us simply sitting there in awe of what we just watched and feeling completely disturbed inside. The same thing applies to movies like The Witch and Midsommar. Horror is a genre that is quite literally intended to get under our skin, so why is it that The Unlit left me completely emotionless? It just doesn’t have a good script and feels so undercooked, almost like they used the first draft of the script. There is definitely a decent movie somewhere in this story but this script was not the one they should’ve used. It’s a respectable effort at the end of the day, but The Unlit sadly doesn’t impress.