The Dreadful review: Turner and Harington in a middling medieval horror

Natasha Kermani’s Gothic horror The Dreadful follows Anne (Sophie Turner) and her mother‑in‑law Morwen (Marcia Gay Harden), who live in an isolated 15th‑century cottage while awaiting Anne’s husband Seamus’s return from the Wars of the Roses. When Jago (Kit Harington), a childhood friend, arrives with news of Seamus’s death, the two women begin murdering travelers for goods and money, while a spectral armored knight on a white horse stalks the countryside, decapitating victims.

The film gestures toward British folk horror — Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man and A Field in England — and echoes the Shin Buddhist parable behind Onibaba, even at one point recalling the gonzo energy of The Mask. Still, it rarely captures the sustained terror or distinctiveness of those films, leaning more on mood than on a clear sense of purpose or urgency.

Most of the big scares arrive in repeated dream sequences, which undercut one another after the first jolting visual.

the dreadful, natasha kermani, sophie turner, kit harington, harden, gothic horror, medieval horror, folk horror, spectral knight, dream sequences