Release Date: December 25, 2004
Starring: Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen, Stephan Enquist, Fermi Reixach, Giancarlo Giannini
Directed by: Jaume Balagueró
Written by: Jaume Balagueró, Fernando de Felipe
Distributed by: Miramax Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (disturbing images, intense terror sequences, thematic elements, language)
I once spent a semester in college studying abroad, in London. I had a great time and have often thought about going back, but lately I’ve been reconsidering my plans to travel abroad. It doesn’t have anything to do with fear of anti-Americanism or of terrorist attacks, but rather a very sensible conclusion I have made after watching a number of Americans experience mysterious, untimely deaths in foreign countries in thinly creepy haunted-house thrillers like The Grudge and now Darkness, set in Japan and Spain, respectively. You just can’t ignore a trend like that.
I think the worst part about dying at the hands of an evil spirit would be that you would never really know why it was they killed you. Evil spirits, being spirits, have elusive, nebulous plans that range from the grandiose to the compulsory, and their only common element is the death of unsuspecting individuals who seem to have wandered into the wrong house. Take, for example, the family of Americans in Darkness: the father, Mark (Iain Glen); the mother, Maria (Lena Olin); their teenage daughter, Regina (Anna Paquin, the star, in a movie that Sarah Michelle Gellar seems to have priced herself out of); and her kid brother, Paul (Stephan Enquist). As the movie begins, they’ve just moved into an isolated mansion, and it’s not long before a series of power outages and a rare solar eclipse leaves them almost constantly in the dark -- with, it turns out, the spirits of six children who were part of an occult ceremony performed in the house exactly 40 years ago.
Since the supernatural souls in the house never get around to explaining their plans, and the people who might know something -- such as the house’s architect, a quivering, nervous man named Villalobos (Fermi Reixach), or Regina’s grandfather, the serious Albert (Giancarlo Giannini) -- speak only in riddles, Darkness is admittedly never very much on plot. This is the sort of movie that does not need a logical reason, only a mildly plausible excuse, to get a group of victims under one roof; that much accomplished, it sets about the business of providing incremental scares that lead up to the dazzlingly terrifying finale in which several (and perhaps all) of them are expunged. Ideally, anyway. Darkness does this much, but it is with a half-hearted sense of obligation, as of a salesman who knows his product is second-rate. Audiences have already seen and experienced most of what it has to offer somewhere else.
The director, a Spanish filmmaker named Jaume Balagueró who wrote the script with Fernando de Felipe, goes for broke on the film’s style, exploiting his haunted house for every camera angle it has to offer. Most of his shots are routine for the subject matter, and it sometimes gets frustrating watching the characters scurry to find a flashlight as the lights repeatedly dim in the story’s peculiar power outages. He also favors a textbook jump-cut strategy, in which most of the scares come in quiet scenes -- Regina relaxing in the bathtub, for instance -- that are suddenly interrupted by frantic bursts of disturbing imagery, as if the evil spirits have invaded the characters’ thoughts, or an indistinguishable figure suddenly, briefly in the foreground. But despite depending on these staples, Balagueró has one reliably frightening shot, in which he reveals the shapes of children standing silently in a dark room just out of the characters’ field of vision. For each of the six or seven times he uses it, it is a hair-raising surprise, and it makes you wonder why he didn’t paint the rest of the movie with this same ominously creative brush.
The problem with Darkness isn’t that it’s not scary. It is, in the familiar, intermittent way of a run-of-the-mill thriller: the scares in this movie, “jump” moments that happen every 10 to 15 minutes, can be found in almost any movie in the genre. But they’re wrapped up in a convoluted mystery that relies on too many contrivances -- the family moving into the house at exactly the right time, and Regina, the movie’s heroine, uncovering the mystery behind the strange power outages at just the right pace to make the climactic scene even more climactic -- to allow for a satisfying conclusion, the same way that winning by cheating is not as satisfying as winning outright. Sometimes people like to pretend that a thriller that does not satisfy them was not scary. It would be cynical and an exaggeration to say that about Darkness. But it would be neither to say that, just the same, Darkness is not a very memorable movie.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)