In Darkness

I watch a lot of movies, not sure if that’s been properly conveyed over the few years I’ve been type-typing on here.  As such, I spend a good amount of time on IMDb, mostly because names tend to sound familiar to me, but never quite manifest themselves fully in my memory, necessitating a quick lookup.  Aside from Solo (the Star Wars entry, not the Mario van Peebles actioner from the 90s), the film the site has been building up for the past couple weeks has been In Darkness, starring my main celebrity crush Natalie Dormer, who co-wrote the script with her fiancé, Anthony Byrne, who also directed the film.  Thanks to my crush and the coverage, the hype in my head was real.  Then I saw the film.

Dormer plays a blind pianist working on a film score (or television score, I really couldn’t tell).  One night, she hears her upstairs neighbor, a woman she has minimal interaction with, get murdered via defenestration.  Funny, the police seem to think it was a suicide, but the neighbor was pregnant, so that seems fishy.  As it turns out, there’s more than meets the eye here, and Dormer gets entangled in some seedy business.

Dormer does rather well in the role, I’d say, and it’s nice to see her get a chance to actually do something in a film, rather than have her talents wasted (oh, the memories of The Forest and, even worse, Captain America: The First Avenger and The Counselor…).  She’s allowed to show a range skills here, and she’s more than up to the task at hand.  Similarly given some welcome room to breathe is Ed Skrein, who’s also tangled up in the murder’s aftermath; though he starts off in his usual pigeonhole of being a bargain-basement Jason Statham (the casting for Transporter: Refueled got that much right, at least), he’s allowed to show a bit more emotion and range, though, admittedly, not quite as much as one would like.  (I give the credit to his hair, which, for once, isn’t as shortly-cropped as his tough guy inspiration.)  There’s also a lithely quasi-evil turn from Joely Richardson, another welcome sight.

On the technical side, Byrne’s direction is pretty standard, with the occasional odd shot making me scratch my head (there’s a point where Dormer gets onto a lift, and that’s all she’s doing, but for some reason it’s filmed at an extreme Dutch angle (we’re talking nearly horizontal, kids) that makes no sense), but at least I was able to follow the action throughout.  The editing is pretty solid, with a nice bit where cuts were made to the beat of a metronome; and the cinematography is also fine, favoring a mild teal tint, mostly befitting the film’s relatively dour tone.  Nothing special coming from Niall Byrne’s score, frankly, but it does its mechanical job.

What gets me about the film, though, is its story.  What I presented above is a slightly expanded version of the IMDb and Wikipedia synopsis, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.  At about the halfway point, a bit of information is revealed, explaining some shots earlier on, and the story takes a bit of a turn.  Though I won’t be spoiling said information here, I will say that its reveal is what turned me off immediately.  What started off as a straightforward yarn turned into something else, something that could have worked had the beginning bits been done differently.  Instead, the script feels like two different ideas clumsily collided and formed a narrative that fails because the two strands don’t work well together.  Once we find this bit out, character motivations change suddenly, and the tone of the film shifts abruptly.  It just doesn’t work.  Had the couple been able to reconcile the ideas, or, frankly, just do away with one or the other and pursue a singular avenue, things likely would have turned out better, if a bit more rote.

As such, I find it hard to fully recommend the film, as it winds up being too garbled to properly convey any sort of coherent story.  If you’re really into Dormer, it’s worth a shot, I s’pose (plus, for the more lascivious amongst us, you get a bit of skin from the star, so there’s that … and now I feel dirty…), but I’d wait ’til it’s either available to rent or when it pops up on the streaming services.