The Dark

Firstly, the self-conscious film geek in me wants to assure you that I snuck into this during the day, after seeing ‘Inside Man’. Secondly I wasn’t sure if I recognised the title on the little display monitor outside the screen. Thirdly, when the film began I remembered that I had seen a trailer for this film a few weeks previously and my stomach began to knot. Oh dear. ‘The Dark’ is a ghost story set in Wales. It stars the frankly edible, Maria Bello and the ‘thinking woman’s bit of rough’, Sean Bean.
Adella (Bello), and her daughter Sarah (Sophie Stuckey) are visiting James (Bean), who is the girl’s father and Bello’s estranged husband. He is living in an improbably creepy cliff-top house that once belonged to a priest-cum-cult leader forty years ago, and whom according to Welsh mythology, brought his daughter back from the dead by convincing his flock to jump to their deaths over the local cliff, into the embrace of Annwynn, or the afterlife.

Various odd things start happening to Adella; she has visions/nightmares/plot contrivances, call them what you will, and then her moody teenage daughter falls into the sea and disappears. Adella gradually uncovers the mysteries of this eerie coastal shire and when another little girl appears, seeming to be the dead daughter of the cult leader, things get very mental indeedy.
Bello’s solid performance certainly belongs in a far better film than this. ‘The Dark’ jumps and squeals from set piece to LOUD NOISES, so woefully that you start to wonder if your heart will actually explode from the sheer volume of sound effect accompanying every person appearing from around a corner, or any door slamming shut. Quiet moments, for example where Bello is analysing a decrepit journal of ghoulish entries, are punctuated by incredible screeching noises and a close ups of little girls with white eyes.

Having run out of monsters in Hollywood, sheep, here, become the beasts from the depths of Hades, and to be fair no matter what way you film a sheep, their bungling gait and vegetative expressions are never going to instil the kind of fear necessary to carry a horror film; yet this film features my first ever celluloid viewing of sheep committing homicide.
My experience of this film featured a running commentary from behind me by a young man trying to dazzle his lady friend by hypothesising on every plot twist. Phones went off repeatedly, with one girl actually answering and informing her caller that she was in the cinema. Normally these things would bother me but not today…

‘The Dark’ is contemptible to the point of outrage. It blatantly steals from far better films such as Flatliners, The Others, and The Sixth Sense and makes a complete hash of it all. Setting the film in Wales, with Welshman David Roeves playing a pivotal role, is definitely an original idea, and subsequently, one that is wasted. At it’s most offensive; we are supposed to assume that Bello’s character is a bad girl (she smokes and has tattoos) and that she is beyond redemption.
Perhaps the filmmakers want us to believe that she is being punished for ruining her own marriage, for being a bad mother, and for lacking in morality. Perhaps they are hoping to cash in on the vast amounts of people who flock to see this kind of rubbish every week. The location has a deliberate Wicker Man vibe to it, but the contemporary horror conventions and a lamentably weak, trite and overlong conclusion means you are left with a feeling of utter misery; you will never get these few hours of your life back, and you still haven’t seen The Proposition.