Uhm. Yeah... Come on, cyn, think of SOMETHING to say...
Darkness is, as the name might cleverly suggest, a very ...dark movie. Dark and wet, to be precise. There's a lot of raining going on, lots of water... lots of... darkness...
To be honest, I don't know what to write about that movie. It's... I don't know. Nondescript maybe? No, that doesn't really cover it, but it conveys some of my feelings.
Uhm.
Let's try to make cyn talk a bit more about this movie. First of all, it features Anna Paquin of "True Blood" fame. I personally call her "annoying bitch", because seriously, in every single episode of "True Blood" aired as of now, she managed to annoy me. Royally. Luckily, she plays a less annoying character here - a teenage daughter who has some issues. I guess it says a lot about my opinion of her character in "True Blood" when I think an annoying teenager with issues is, well, less of a nuisance. Also, Regina is less of a stupid name than "Sookie Stackhouse". I mean... come on. "Sookie"? *shakes head*
So... she's in the movie and plays the teenage daughter of Mark (Iain Glen) and Maria (Lena Olin), who, together with said daughter and their young boy Paul (some kid), move into an old house in Spain. The family itself is American, with only Mark originally being from Spain. He suffered some weird traumatic event during his childhood, after which he and his mother went to the USA, whilst his father, Albert Rua - a famed doctor - stayed behind. Albert also helped to arrange that Mark and his family can move into the house (which had been uninhabited for fourty years)... but soon after they move in, weird things begin to happen - the lights go out daily, Paul develops a fear of the dark, Mark suffers from increasingly high levels of psychological stress (which seems to be tied to the darkness, somehow)... and ghostly children, who actually look kind of creepy, are watching the family... watching and waiting - for the eclipse...
Great, now I managed to give a plot synopsis. Kudos to me.
The problem with Darkness is... well. I don't know. It's aesthetically pleasing at times. At other times, it's just bland. There are a few scares... but, well. Uhm. I am grasping at straws here... there just is nothing special or memorable about this flick.
Also, the story is confusing. I was constantly trying to figure out why the plot is happening. Ghosts? The supernatural seeping into our world in a Lovecraftian way? A haunted house? WHY?! So... whilst I was guessing and trying to make sense of the plot, I sort of enjoyed the movie. Not immensely, but it wasn't bad either. Just something to fill a boring Saturday afternoon with procrastinating.
Problem? The very second we get an explanation for the things that happened (and continue to happen), it gets lame. Lame and boring. Plus, the explanation doesn't work. It just doesn't. Nope. *shakes head*
There should be a rule for scriptwriters: If a movie like Dracula AD 1972 has a coherent plot and manages to capture the audience and your movie can't... you're doing it wrong.
As I already mentioned in passim, the movie has atmosphere. What it doesn't have is a good story with a good plot based on a good script. Hell, we get a freaking "evil occultists sacrifice children in order to do stuff that is vaguely connected with darkness"-plot! Which, as I already said, just doesn't work. You see, evil occultists usually want to reach some sort of goal with their evil doings (I know this sounds farfetched, but trust me on this). "Darkness" is not a goal. I can't stress this enough. Yes, I'll admit it, plunging the world into primordial chaos, darkness and silence sounds nice to me, but just doing some stuff vaguely reminiscent of "evil doings" and blabbing about it is ...pointless. Pointless and a bit stupid.
You see, I can get passionate about this movie. The portrayal of occultism is abysmal, and the stuff the writers "know" about occultism and symbolism is abysmal as well. I'll grant them that the connection to the Egyptian conceptualisation of darkness as a sort of primordial, chaotic thing (think of Apep, the snake that the sun-god has to defeat every night) closely linked to water was very beautiful. I like spotting references to ancient cultures in my movies. What I don't like is being stabbed in the eyes with incompetent portrayals of "occultism".
But I'm sure that there are people who approve of the movie's plot. Ehm... make that "plot".
4.5/10 watery buildings which were built in order to enhance stuff. For darkness. Or something like that. Really, barely coherent, the thing.
