Spanish Shades of Gray
Darkness
Starring Anna Paquin, Lena Olin and Giancarlo Giannini
Directed by Jaume Balagueró
Written by Jaume Balagueró and Miguel Tejada-Flores
Dimension
Make no mistake, Darkness is a ridiculous film choked with genre clichés and stolen scares, yet there’s something genuinely dark and nasty wrapped inside all that ridiculousness, something that is oddly affecting, perhaps because of those very flaws.
X-Men’s Anna Paquin stars as Regina, a teen whose family moves into an old house with a 40-year-old secret involving a cult of child killers trying to summon a great evil. Her father, despite being involved in the crime as a boy, somehow misses the fact that he’s moved into the same house again and spirals into paranoid delusions while uncovering old items hidden in the walls. Regina tries to hold the fam’ together while investigating the house’s past, but it’s tough when Mom (Lena Olin) ignores her demands to move, younger brother draws spooky pictures and sees ghosts, and grandpa (veteran Italian character actor Giancarlo Giannini) knows more than he’s letting on. Add a prophetic eclipse, an ominous stranger spouting exposition, Giallo-style overacting and telescoped plotting, scares cribbed from The Shining, The Exorcist and several Polanski movies, and Darkness collapses under its outlandish lack of originality.
However, in that pile of rubble something unsettling survives. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but somewhere between director Jaume Balagueró’s sooty, claustrophobic style (sometimes compared to that of David Fincher) and the unexpectedly bleak ending that lives up to the film’s title, an unease develops that lingers after the credits roll. Much of it has to do with being unprepared for the finale (that, dammit, should’ve come much sooner), because the preceding mediocrity and presence of a Hollywood starlet develops a false sense of viewer security about the film’s ability to disturb. It just doesn’t seem that Darkness should have the balls or bite of its last ten nightmarish minutes when expectations of a clean resolution literally fade to black.
That subtly unnerving atmosphere and narrative blindsiding in Balagueró’s earlier cult/serial killer horror-thriller The Nameless (which, unlike this Spanish import, wasn’t re-edited for North America), is much more successful. Track down a copy and watch that film instead. But don’t turn your back on the critically maligned Darkness entirely, because there’s something disturbing hiding in its dank little corners that you may want to discover for yourself.
Dave Alexander