Dark
There’s an interesting hook to Nick Basile’s “Dark”- the lights go out in New York in 2003, less than two years after 9/11. What caused it? We don’t know. When will they be back on? We don’t know. Who can you trust? What if you can’t get in touch with your loved ones? All of these are great questions that “Dark” has bouncing around in its head. Unfortunately, Basile’s film, though I’m fine with not having them all answered, takes a long time to asking them. Granted, the blackout doesn’t have to be all that the film is about, but it just doesn’t do a good job bringing its initial narrative to a place where I want to follow it in this direction, and it doesn’t really follow through with the combination of the two particularly well.
The film begins with two lovers- Kate (Whitney Able) and Leah (Alexandra Breckenridge)- in bed together. Kate is trying to get Leah to do some rough stuff, but she isn’t having any of it. The time they spend together after each other is done with work- Leah is a photographer, Kate is a yoga instructor- is awkward, and isn’t a good way for the two to leave things as Leah is going out of town for a few days for work. Later that day, Kate goes back to her studio apartment, and she tries to take her mind off of the dark thoughts she’s having. The power goes out, leading to a pitch black night where fear leads to an amplification of the thoughts she is having, with light scarce.
The story by Basile and Elias, who wrote the screenplay, feels like an organic progression, but it also feels flat and empty from an emotional standpoint. I got the request to watch this film in 2016, long before Darren Aronofsky released “mother!,” yet I find myself thinking of “mother!” as the way this film should have been done. If this is going to be a story of personal anxiety in the face of a scary world, I wonder if it shouldn’t be a little more over-the-top and melodramatic. Maybe part of it is Able’s performance, which is not bad, but just didn’t really draw me in as it went along- plus, the initial tension in her relationship with Leah doesn’t really carry over into after the blackout, and that doesn’t help the film maintain any momentum. When you’re going to have a closed-door story of anxiety, you need that momentum to build to a climax, and this film feels almost like it’s split in two, with separate stories following the same character. Both stories are interesting, but they don’t really come together into a single narrative that sustains the entire way. I wish I could say I liked what this film did, but I feel like it falls short of what it’s trying to do.
