The Wretched (2019)
Directed by Drew T. Pierce
No — The Wretched is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Wretched arrives with a premise that has served the genre since before anyone thought to keep score: a teenage boy, a divorce, a neighbor who is not what she appears to be, and a tree in the woods that eats children and erases them from memory.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes a few non-white actors (Azie Tesfai, Gabriela Quezada Bloomgarden) in supporting roles, but their presence is incidental and never remarked upon. No deliberate diversity-driven casting agenda is evident.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The antagonist is a female witch, but this is a genre convention rather than any statement about gender or patriarchy. No feminist themes are present.
The film engages with no racial themes or commentary whatsoever.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No economic or class-based critique exists in the film.
The witch's decaying body is used for horror effect, not body-positive messaging.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a straightforward supernatural horror with no historical revisionism.
The film delivers scares rather than sermons; there is no didactic social messaging.
Why it received this score
The Wretched arrives with a premise that has served the genre since before anyone thought to keep score: a teenage boy, a divorce, a neighbor who is not what she appears to be, and a tree in the woods that eats children and erases them from memory. The Pierce Brothers direct with competence and a genuine affection for the drive-in vocabulary. Skin crawls, literally. There is a buck, a cellar, a sign on a door. It is a film that knows exactly what it is and never once apologizes for it, which is more than most contemporary horror can manage.
What the film does not do is lecture. Its cast includes a handful of performers of color in supporting roles, and the script treats them as people rather than as statements, which is either a quiet virtue or simply an absence of ambition, depending on the ledger we keep. There is no gender politics to speak of, no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no meditation on the body that is not aimed squarely at making the audience uncomfortable. The witch is a witch. She possesses, she consumes, she moves on. The horror is domestic and ancient and entirely unconcerned with the questions of the day.
This is, in its modest way, a relief. The film topped the domestic box office for six consecutive weekends in the spring of 2020, a distinction earned by a pandemic and a dearth of competition, and it wears that crown without pretension. It is a well-crafted B-movie with a nasty final shot and no interest in instructing anyone. We are left with the rare artifact: a horror film that wants only to unsettle us, and mostly succeeds.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A rebellious teenage boy, struggling with his parents' imminent divorce, encounters a terrifying evil after his next-door neighbor becomes possessed by an ancient witch that feasts on children.
Questions about The Wretched
Is The Wretched woke?
No — The Wretched is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Wretched have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 15.
How does The Wretched compare to other 2019 movies?
It ranks #222 of the 284 films from 2019 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Black Christmas (79).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.