Film Review: Darkness

About Darkness (2002)Horror directed by Jaume Balaguero that follows father and husband Mark (Iain Glen), his wife (Lena Olin), and their two children (Anna Paquin and Stephan Enquist) on their move to an outwardly quaint country home. When the family decide to host a housewarming party, their houseguests begin to mysteriously disappear, the lights begin to flicker incessantly on and off, while Mark’s Huntington’s disease makes a comeback after a ten-year dormancy. Regina (Paquin) expects that the problem stems from the house itself, but no one believes her. Determined to prove her case, Regina decides to pay a visit to the man (Fermi Rexach) who built the house to begin with.

Starring: Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen, Giancarlo Giannini, Fele Martínez

Directed by: Jaume Balaguero

Runtime: 102 minutes

Studio: Dimension

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Review:  Darkness 

Jaume Balaguero’s horror flick tells the story of an American family that move into a new home in Spain. While Maria (Lena Olin) is focused on unpacking everything immediately, her husband Mark (Iain Glen) is pre-occupied with work and their children Regina (Anna Paquin) and Paul (Stephan Enquist) are settling into school. Things take a sinister turn when Mark begins to convulse while stuck in a traffic jam and has visions of children in a house. His father, Albert (Giancarlo Giannini), cites this as a mental problem that Mark has had in the past and is not unfamiliar to Maria and Regina. Ordered to rest, Mark and his family soon find themselves at the mercy of an evil presence in their home.

Mark’s sudden attack is the start of the family’s worries but then Paul begins to express his discomfort about darkness and is visibly frightened. He begins to have marks on his body, bruising, which suggests abuse of some sort. Is this down to Mark or is there something else afoot? Frequent power cuts in the house coupled with her brother’s fears, lead Regina to suspect something isn’t right in the house so she begins to investigate. What she uncovers is history leading back forty years to the previous time there was an eclipse and now forty years later, another one is due.

I had big issues with Darkness. It uses many of the usual tricks such as shadowy figures watching in the background or walking in front of the camera, nothing especially scary or remotely surprising. The storyline was somewhat predictable and in the end not overly spectacular. It is a shame seeing Oscar winner Paquin and Olin, who was great in Alias, have to descend to a film such as this. It isn’t until the final fifteen minutes or so that anything tantamount to scary actually happens and by that point it all feels very anti-climatic.

Darkness initially seems like an okay idea for a horror film but in the end it lacks any genuine scares or sense of unease. The acting isn’t spectacular, the characters are not particularly interesting and the wait for the end scenes when anything of interest occurs feels like a long time coming. There are many well-crafted horror films out there but this is sadly not one of them.

Verdict: 1/5

(Film source: reviewer’s own copy)

Film Review: Darkness | Thank you for reading Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dave