Once you get over the fact that mother and daughter (played by Laurie Holden and Nicole Munoz) look nothing alike, the movie works for the most part. The daughter is clearly meant to look more like her deceased father than her mother so as to be a constant reminder of the mother's dead husband -- there is dialogue to that effect. But this is a bit too much, so much too much that I half-expected the mother to yell "You're not my daughter!" at some point.
Nicole Munoz plays Leah as the most wholesome-looking Goth ever, as are her three high-school friends. They're all into a Providence horror writer who apparently puts working spells in his novels. Say what you will about Stephen King, but he never did that!
So in a fit of adolescent angst (or possibly sociopathic behaviour), Leah calls upon the demon Pyewacket to kill her mother. Then she regrets it and tries to send the demon back before it kills her mother. Oops.
Pyewacket is a 'real' demon name, by the way. I'd previously run across it in the Kim Novak witch-romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), also starring Jimmy Stewart. There, Pyewacket is Novak's cat/familiar.
The acting from the principals (there aren't many principals) is solid throughout. And there are some genuine scares, not all of them jump-scares. The film-makers keep most of the horror off-screen, and there's very little overt violence. The movie seems to make it clear that the supernatural is 'really' happening, but it does leave some room for doubt in the old Turn of the Screw manner. How much doubt depends on whether a viewer believes certain shots to be objective camerawork or subjective visions by Munoz's character.
Not a great movie, but the second half makes up a lot for the slowness of the first half, with the last ten minutes really singing. The filmmakers seem to me to have a lot of promise. And Pyewacket barely clocks in at 90 minutes, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Lightly recommended.
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