The Dark End of the Street
In “The Dark End of the Street,” a community is rocked by someone killing pets. One homeowner, Dee Dee (Christine Campbell), comes home to find her cat brutally killed in her home. It’s not the first time that someone’s pet has been killed recently on this street, and it has other pet owners concerned. One of them is Sue and Keith (Jennifer Kim and Daniel K. Issac), who recently bought a bird for their daughter, Natalie (Kasey Lee), and now feel their own security threatened. This one night will have plenty of people making decisions that could change their lives, even if it’s something as simple as going out with an old friend, like Jim (Scott Friend), does, leaving his pregnant wife (Brooke Bloom) home alone to spend some time out of the house.
Writer-director Kevin Tran’s film is insular in how it focuses on this particular neighborhood, and street, with even the police and media not spending a lot of time investigating the pet killings; they are there solely to set up other storylines involving these characters. The movie is not as ominous as the title makes it sound, or the score sounds; it’s very much a film about interactions and the ways people come together, and it doesn’t have a whole lot of tension or weight to anything going on, except late in the film when a mistake might change lives forever. There are some decent storylines in this movie, but it feels very surface-level in the emotions it illicits in the viewers. I got into the movie fairly easily, but I’m not sure it’s something that anyone will remember too long after it finishes up.
