The Dreadful (2026) Movie Review: Marcia Gay Harden Commands This Atmospheric Gothic Horror That Stumbles in Its Final Act

The Dreadful is a 2026 horror-thriller written and directed by Natasha Kermani, produced by Redwire Pictures, Black Magic, and Illium Pictures. The film stars Sophie Turner as Anne, a young medieval widow caught between loyalty and survival, Kit Harington as Jago, the childhood friend who returns from war with devastating news, and Marcia Gay Harden as Morwen, Anne's fierce and increasingly dangerous mother-in-law. Laurence O'Fuarain and Jonathan Howard complete the principal cast. Distributed by Lionsgate in the United States and True Brit Entertainment in the United Kingdom, the film was released in select theaters and digitally on February 20, 2026.

The film arrives with a genuinely compelling pedigree. Kermani, whose previous work includes the underrated Lucky and Abraham's Boys, draws her inspiration from Kaneto Shindo's 1964 Japanese masterpiece Onibaba, transplanting that film's stark moral fable about two women navigating survival and desire into 15th-century medieval England, shot on location in Tintagel, Cornwall, where Arthurian legend places the birthplace of King Arthur. The Game of Thrones reunion between Turner and Harington draws obvious marketing attention, but The Dreadful is more interesting and more frustrating than that particular hook suggests. At its best, it is a confident, fog-drenched feminist psychological thriller with a towering supporting performance from Harden. At its worst, it is a film that undermines its own considerable strengths with a third act that loses both its nerve and its focus.

Story and Screenplay: A Rich Feminist Fable That Loses Its Way Before the Finish Line

Kermani's screenplay establishes its world with admirable economy. Anne and Morwen exist at the absolute margins of feudal society, surviving through what their small garden produces, what they can trade, and what Morwen is willing to steal. The two women have built something fragile and functional together in the absence of the men who supposedly define their place in this world. When Jago returns from the Wars of the Roses without Seamus, everything shifts: the household's delicate balance tips, Morwen's desperation escalates toward violence, and Anne is suddenly navigating competing pressures from two people whose devotion to her comes packaged with demands she did not ask for.

The screenplay is at its most assured when it stays anchored in the psychological terrain of this triangle. The questions Kermani is asking are genuinely interesting: how does a woman maintain autonomy in a world that has structured her entire existence around her relationship to men? What do we owe the people who keep us alive, even when their methods and motivations become corrupting? The Dark Ages setting, researched with evident care and given material authenticity through a production design full of the practical textures of actual poverty, allows these contemporary feminist concerns to breathe in a historical context without feeling like anachronistic finger-wagging. The mysterious armored knight who haunts Anne's dreams and stalks the edges of their property operates both as potential supernatural threat and as a symbol of the violent masculine power that has shaped every aspect of these women's lives.

The third act is where the screenplay's control breaks down. The reveal of the knight's identity and the truths it carries about Seamus's fate are handled with a rushed abruptness that the preceding careful build does not prepare for. More frustratingly, once the reveal arrives, the film does not know what to do with it. The supernatural elements, which have been carefully maintained at an ambiguous distance throughout, are suddenly thrust to the foreground without the space to pay them off adequately, and the resolution of Anne's arc arrives so quickly that the growth the film has been building toward feels summarized rather than earned. It is a landing that the structural intelligence of the first two acts does not deserve.

Acting and Characters: Harden Is Extraordinary While Turner and Harington Face an Uphill Battle Against Thin Writing

Marcia Gay Harden's Morwen is the film's unambiguous center of gravity, a performance of remarkable range and physical commitment that earns every superlative applied to it. She plays the character across the full arc from a mourning mother managing a household through sheer force of will, to a woman whose fear of abandonment has curdled into something genuinely frightening. The horror is not in Morwen becoming a monster but in recognizing the entirely comprehensible human desperation that drives her to each escalating act. Harden makes the character's logic internally consistent even as the choices become increasingly extreme, and she delivers one or two scenes so precisely calibrated that the film around her temporarily achieves exactly the register it is aiming for throughout.

Sophie Turner (Steal) works harder than the material consistently rewards. Anne is conceived as the film's moral center, a woman navigating between Morwen's increasingly violent pragmatism and Jago's masculine assumptions about what she needs, and Turner captures the character's surface qualities with skill. The icy composure she developed over years as Sansa Stark serves her well in conveying Anne's careful management of every interaction. The problem is that the screenplay rarely grants Anne unmediated interiority: almost every scene places her in reaction to Morwen or Jago rather than in moments of her own definition, which means Turner's technical ability cannot fully compensate for the character's underwritten interior life. There is also the matter of the inconsistent accent, which is barely present in Turner's performance, accidentally making her the most intelligible member of a cast that occasionally makes the dialogue hard to follow.

Kit Harington (The Family Plan 2) is genuinely wasted in a role that the film never fully commits to developing. Jago has the ingredients of a complex figure: a deserter haunted by what he witnessed, a man whose feelings for Anne are real but whose methods of expressing them replicate the same possessive dynamics he is presumably meant to contrast with Morwen's. Harington brings natural charisma and period presence to the role, and his scenes with Turner have real warmth, but Jago's arc resolves with a disappointing anticlimactic shrug that leaves both character and actor stranded. Laurence O'Fuarain makes a strong impression in the limited material available to Seamus, bringing a deeply unnerving energy to the sequences depicting what actually happened to him at war.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Kermani's Visual Intelligence Is the Film's Most Consistent Strength

Kermani directs with a formal confidence that frequently transcends the screenplay's limitations. The Tintagel location provides a landscape of extraordinary atmospheric potential, and she uses it with intelligence: the coastal fog, the dark tree lines, the particular quality of light on the Cornish coast in what appears to be late autumn or early winter. The film has a genuine sense of place, and that sense of place does meaningful narrative work, communicating the isolation and the physical reality of poverty at this period without requiring the screenplay to explain what the setting conveys visually.

Julia Swain's cinematography is one of the year's most visually accomplished achievements in the genre. The framing throughout favors intimate close work, placing the camera near the characters' faces during the film's most charged exchanges and then pulling back to establish the surrounding darkness or open landscape at moments of exposure and danger. The contrast between the warm interior spaces of Anne and Morwen's home and the threatening outside world is consistently well-managed, and the sequences involving the armored knight benefit from a genuinely unsettling visual language that understands how to use obscured faces and partial visibility to generate dread. The production design within the cottage is especially impressive, full of the authentic textures of a medieval working-class household that most period films approximate rather than realize.

The editing maintains a deliberate rhythm that suits the film's psychological focus and occasionally, particularly in the middle section, tips into the slower-than-necessary pacing that multiple perspectives note. The flashback sequences to Anne, Jago, and Seamus as children, while narratively functional, are handled with a visual grammar that is notably more conventional than the surrounding film, representing the one area where Kermani's visual intelligence temporarily deserts her. The film looks best when it stays in the grey, wintry present, and the golden sunlight of the childhood memories creates a tonal inconsistency that undermines rather than enriches the contrast it is trying to establish.

Music and Atmosphere: Green's Score and Swain's Images Build a World That Feels Genuinely Inhabited

Composer Jamal Green's score is the film's most controversial technical element. At its best, it operates as an unobtrusive atmospheric presence, reinforcing the film's prevailing mood of low-level supernatural dread without announcing itself. The lilting, dark quality of the music in the film's quieter passages suits the psychological register perfectly. The problem emerges in the more intense sequences, where the score overreaches, swelling to instruct the audience how to feel at moments where the images and performances are already communicating the necessary information. A restraint it does not always maintain would have made the score's effective passages even more effective by contrast.

The overall atmosphere that Kermani constructs is the film's most consistent achievement. The sense of a world in which the supernatural and the natural are not clearly distinguished, where the terror of a knight on horseback and the terror of starvation exist in the same register of real threat, is maintained with genuine skill across the film's first two acts. The sound design contributes to this effectively, with ambient sounds, wind, water, the distant sound of the world beyond the cove, creating a sense of the characters' geographical and social isolation without requiring the screenplay to describe it. The Dreadful's atmosphere is genuinely Gothic in the meaningful sense: not decorative darkness but a world in which darkness has moral and spiritual weight.

Trailer The Dreadful (2026)

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• Marcia Gay Harden delivers one of the finest performances of her career as Morwen, bringing full complexity and genuine menace to a character who could easily have been reduced to archetype.
• Julia Swain's cinematography is visually magnificent, capturing the Cornwall landscape and the intimate interior spaces with equal skill and establishing a consistent atmospheric language.
• The feminist reinterpretation of the Onibaba source material is intelligent and specific, grounding contemporary questions about female autonomy in a historically realized medieval setting.
• The film's sense of physical place is exceptional, with production design and location work that make the characters' poverty and isolation feel genuinely inhabited rather than decorative.
• The supernatural knight is effectively handled for most of the runtime, maintained at a productive ambiguity between psychological projection and actual threat.
• Turner and Harington have real chemistry in their warmer scenes, lending the central relationship a credibility it might not have achieved with less committed performers.

What doesn't work:

• The third act collapses under the weight of its reveals, rushing through the supernatural resolution in ways that undermine the careful build of the preceding two acts.
• Kit Harington is severely underwritten, with Jago's arc resolving in a manner so anticlimactic it borders on embarrassing given the character's narrative importance.
• The inconsistent accents throughout, particularly Harington's heavily applied old English and Turner's barely present version, create a tonal inconsistency that frequently distracts from the performances.
• Anne lacks sufficient interior scenes to make her arc from compliance to autonomy feel fully earned rather than asserted.
• The score over-instructs during intense sequences, undermining moments that the images and performances already handle adequately.
• The childhood flashback sequences are filmed with a visual grammar that feels out of place against the surrounding film's more sophisticated approach.

Final Verdict: Come for the Gothic Atmosphere, Stay for Harden, Leave Slightly Disappointed by the Ending

Rating: 6/10

The Dreadful earns its 6 out of 10 rating as a film with genuine atmosphere, a landmark supporting performance, and intelligent feminist thematic ambitions that cannot fully recover from a third act that squanders the goodwill built by everything preceding it. The rating reflects a film that is more interesting, more visually accomplished, and more thematically engaged than its marketing suggests, while being honest about the structural frustration that prevents it from achieving the cult status it might otherwise have claimed.

Viewers who respond to atmospheric, psychologically focused Gothic horror rather than conventional scares will find more to appreciate here than those seeking visceral thrills. Fans of Kermani's previous work will recognize her characteristic concerns and find them developed with increasing visual confidence. Admirers of Marcia Gay Harden will find this the best showcase for her talents in years, and the performance alone justifies the viewing experience for those who prioritize acting above narrative satisfaction. Anyone who loves the Cornish landscape or Arthurian visual mythology will find Swain's photography a genuine visual pleasure throughout.

Those drawn primarily by the Game of Thrones reunion should calibrate expectations accordingly: this is Harden's film far more than Turner's or Harington's, and the reunion element, while not without its charms, is not the engine driving anything here. Anyone who needs a satisfying ending will find The Dreadful particularly frustrating, as the film's most significant failure is precisely its inability to close on terms commensurate with its opening. There are enough genuine accomplishments here to make The Dreadful worth the visit, but it remains the work of a talented filmmaker who did not quite land the difficult final turn.

The Dreadful is released in select theaters and digitally in the United States by Lionsgate on February 20, 2026. UK distribution via True Brit Entertainment. Language: English. Runtime: 94 minutes. Rating: R.