The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Some people say we can now measure how much we enjoy a hangout by the amount of times we grab our phones. In Pyewacket, audiences scrolled to the end of their Instagram and Facebook news feeds and were still bored.

Pyewacket is about teenage Leah (Nicole Muñoz) who is into occult rituals and witchcraft practices. Leah struggles to deal with her grieving mother (Laurie Holden) after the death of her father and, in a surge of anger, she performs a ritual summoning a demon called Pyewacket to kill her mother. She later regrets it and tries to take it back in an attempt to save her mother and herself from the demonic spirit that wants to destroy them both.

For the first 45 minutes of the 90-minute film, there is nothing out of the ordinary but the sound of steps. Build-ups are important in horror films, but this is not a build-up, it is something that takes up half the film and it’s boring. The fact that there was anticipation music every couple of minutes which ended in a sound of footsteps, and then a cut to a normal day scene became annoying at about the 6^th or 7^th time.

Secondly, the film contained several scenes or even shots that should be cut out; the shots that were there, especially in the second half of the film, had some scares or at least attempts of scares with something actually happening, unlike the first half. However, the attempts of the second half to become a horror film were not successful since the effects and images used were minimal, outdated, and even silly.

Most of the film are shots of Nicole Muñoz, and given the fact that this feature attempts to be a horror film, Muñoz is supposed to be scared. She tries, but her performance is neither genuine nor plausible. Muñoz does not portray the guilty and loving emotions she should be feeling towards her mother, instead it seems like her emotional state is the same throughout the film: trying but failing to look genuinely scared. The only exception to that could be the final scene where her performance portrays the emotions she should have been showing throughout the film.

Laurie Holden did a better job as she portrayed the devastated, grieving widow and struggling mother well. Holden even did okay when she was possessed by the demon and only had pale makeup for help, but it actually somehow worked. However, nothing she did could have saved this project.

The film lacked a comprehensible intriguing plot, good acting and the adrenaline rush horror fans typically search for. So, without sugarcoating it, save your time and don’t watch it.