Where Darkness Dwells changes what kind of horror movie it is at least twice. Surprisingly, that’s not its problem. Michael May’s feature directorial debut handles those shifts with real confidence. The trouble comes later, when a film this good at making us unsure finally decides it owes us an explanation.
Trish Bostwick (Tara Perry) is a reporter with bigger plans than her job allows. She spends her days churning out quick, clickable online filler, and it’s slowly starving her ambition. So when a missing person case lands in front of her, she grabs it and runs. The trail leads to Wentworth, a mental institution tucked away in the New England woods.
This is where May and cowriter Alexandra Grunberg make their first smart move. Wentworth doesn’t look like a horror movie asylum at all. It’s clean and orderly and almost boring. There’s nothing obvious to point at, and that makes Trish’s suspicion harder to trust. Maybe she’s onto something. Maybe she just wants a real story badly enough to invent one.
Then a stranger with a knife shows up. After that the investigation turns into something far lonelier.
Tara Perry Carries the Weight
Tara Perry has a lot of work to do here. She has to play an ambitious reporter and an uneasy outsider. She also has to play a frightened survivor and eventually a woman who can’t fully trust her own perceptions. Perry holds all of those versions of Trish together, and the movie leans on her in every one of its modes.
Katie Parker gives the film a thornier thread as Cassy. Her bond with Trish mixes friendship with professional ambition and something closer to exploitation. It’s hard to say where one stops and the next begins, and that suits a movie built on not being sure. Scott Dean and May himself round out the cast.
Alone in the Woods
The forest stretch is the best thing in Where Darkness Dwells. Trish is on her own with mechanical trouble, sounds she can’t place and threats she can’t confirm. Next to everything that comes after, it’s simple filmmaking. That’s exactly why it works. Nobody needs a mythology to be afraid of a noise in the dark when help isn’t coming.
Matt Glass handles both the cinematography and the score, and the locations do a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting.
From there the film slides into psychological horror and on toward something Lovecraftian. Don’t expect tentacles. The cosmic ideas lean into backwoods folk horror and old regional lore. They work best as a way of making Trish’s trauma and paranoia and isolation visible. Under all the ritual, this is really a story about someone surviving something and being forced to face it.
Where It Loses Its Grip
The final act is where things wobble. So much of the film’s fear comes from absence and from what Trish can’t see or can’t be sure she heard. Once mythology and explanation take over, some of that power leaks out. A few of the bigger occult ideas also feel larger than the production can convincingly put on screen.
Some of the nighttime scenes are so dark it’s hard to tell what’s happening. That reads less like mood and more like mud.
None of this sinks the movie. Where Darkness Dwells is simply more gripping while it’s knocking Trish off balance than while it explains what that means. A reporter alone in the woods who isn’t sure what she heard is scarier than any system built to account for it.
After a run on the festival circuit, Where Darkness Dwells is now available on UK digital from GrimmVision, which released it on September 21, 2026.
