Metacritic reviews

Alexandra Daddario and Maddie Hasson are the Hammett and Hetfield of Marc Meyers’ eyeliner ensemble, with looks that kill and attitudes doubly deadly. For that, this critic can downgrade other complaints. It’s full of amplified unhallowed fun and fiendish shocks in the name of rock n’ roll…or maybe that’s just what “The Man” wants you to think.

We Summon The Darkness is a wickedly fun and delightfully devilish thrill ride led by electric performances from Alexandra Daddario and Maddie Hasson.

The film is propelled by a confident lead performance from Alexandra Daddario.

We Summon the Darkness reveals itself to be a fun ride when all is said and done because nobody on-screen knows what he/she is doing.

An appealing cast and slick period production values make this an entertaining enough retro bloodbath.

We Summon the Darkness is a psycho thriller that pulls the bloody rug out from under you, and does it in a shivery sly way.

We Summon the Darkness is fine throughout; but it peaks in its first third, when nothing much is happening beyond some very good actors recreating the small-town rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of the recent past.

Director Marc Meyers’s sometimes funny, but more often creaky, spin on devil worship, murder and good ol’ fashioned religion has only one or two nifty ideas – all of which are sacrificed early on, leaving about an hour of footage in desperate need of divine intervention.

It’s not awful, not “so bad it’s good,” either. Take away the “twist,” which you’ve guessed and which anybody seeing the trailer or even the poster could figure out, and We Summon the Darkness only summons tedium.

The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.