IMDb plot summary: A teenage girl moves into a remote country house with her family, only to discover that their gloomy new home has a horrifying past that threatens to destroy the family.
Directed by Jaume Balagueró. Starring Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, and Iain Glen.
Darkness is a horror film about a family who moves into a new house, only for strange things to start happening, possibly centered around the father's strange illness that occasionally makes him unpredictably violent. The film this reminded me most of, although it was filmed several years later, was The Orphanage. Problem is, The Orphanage is beautifully filmed and scripted and acted, and this one is kind of sloppy. There is one actually-pretty-cool twist in the last 15 minutes of the movie that is fun enough that it almost makes me forget how lazy the rest is, but not quite. As much as I've enjoyed watching Anna Paquin's filmography, I don't enjoy her in thrillers -- her instincts are often to lean shrill, which is hard for me to engage with. The story kind of meanders around in an uninteresting way that keeps the tension from every truly climbing until the very end. If this is a genre or a cast you have special affinity for, it might still be worth the watch, but on its own it's pretty mediocre.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Darkness < Duel
Darkness > She's All That
Darkness < Matchstick Men
Darkness < Bridge to Terabithia
Darkness > My Six Loves
Darkness > The Big House
Darkness > Sweet and Lowdown
Darkness > The Rookie
Darkness < Charlotte's Web (1973)
Darkness > Millions
Darkness < Dallas Buyers Club
Final spot: #2498 out of 3619, or 31%.
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