The premise of Darkness is one that fans of horror movies are no doubt familiar with - a family moves into an old house only to discover that it is haunted by an evil force (which, frustratingly, remains undefined for the duration of the film). Problems, naturally, ensue. The father goes slowly insane, the mother pretends that nothing out of the ordinary is happening, the teenaged daughter tries to convince everybody else that evil spirits really do exist, and the pre-adolescent son is harassed by ghosts. While unoriginal, the film's premise could serve as the foundation for an interesting story... unfortunately, Jaume Balaguero fails to do much with it, instead opting to systematically destroy the viewer's brain by bombarding it with bad camera work, lengthy (and ultimately meaningless) character development, and a series of largely unrelated images randomly mashed together in an unsuccessful effort to produce a plot. While it lacks any entertainment value, I have become convinced that Darkness would make an excellent torture device.
The most glaring short-coming of Darkness is that, for a film supposedly devoted to exploring supernatural horror, it spends very little time actually doing anything of the sort. During the first hour of the film, the supernatural menace lurking within the family's new home is just vaguely hinted at - there are some brief motion shots of children dressed in black (accompanied by the spastic camera work mentioned below) and a frequently played audio track of ghostly children giggling. That's it. The only scene that does more than vaguely hint at the nature of the supernatural presence in the house is one in which the pre-adolescent son's colored pencils are sucked under his bed by an unseen force. Admittedly, this last scene may tingle the spine a bit, but one creepy scene in a sea of hundreds does not a good horror movie make. Near the end of the film, the supernatural elements do become a bit (and only a bit) more prevalent, although they still lack any meaningful definition in terms of both on-camera presence and story development. Ironically, the lack of meaningful definition in Darkness is so prevalent that it ironically becomes the film's most noteworthy feature.
The first fourty-five of Darkness is little more than a plodding, slow-paced, character introduction sequence that, at times, resembles many after school television specials aired in the 1980s - and, despite its length and slow pacing, it is completely uninformative. All of the main characters personae in the film are slowly described for the audience - the father suffers from a rare disease, the mother willfully ignores the problems of her family, the daughter assumes the typical responsibilities that her mother neglects, and the pre-adolescent son has suddenly developed a fear of the dark. Yes, that is the extent of the character depth that Jaume Balaguero manges to convey in an *hour* of film. Three other characters (one of whom inexplicably becomes a major player near the end of the film) make brief appearances, but are not defined in any meaningful way, save by title or stated personal relationship to the family living in the farmhouse. At the conlusion of this character exploration piece, I was ready to remove my own frontal lobe, despite the fact that the director was already doing an excellent job of rendering it inert.
The second (and equally glaring) short-coming of Darkness is the lack of any discernable plot during the majority of the film. As mentioned above, the first fourty-five minutes of the film is largely devoted to introducing characters, not exploring the supernatural - which is unfortunate, as that theme would have served as the foundation for the plot that suddenly appears in the last thirty minutes of the film, providing it with some definition. As it stands, the revelation that the family's home is actually a temple dedicated to an unnamed evil, built by an unexplained cult, for only vaguely explained purposes is neither meaningful or shocking; instead feeling like a clumsy, last minute effort by Jaume Balaguero to inject the film with some sense of purpose. Lacking a firm foundation and any meaningful definition, the tardy plot of Darkness is all but non-existent when it finally arrives, making for a disappointing anti-climax and causing the viewer to wonder exactly what they were thinking when they paid money to see this film (if they were capable of thinking anything at all by this point in time).
The third (and completely infuriating) short-coming of Darkness is that the director seems to equate shaking the camera with inspiring horror. The problem here lies in the fact that scenes filmed in this manner appear as little more than an undecipherable blur on the screen.This mistake plagues the film from the opening sequence, setting the tone for the remaining hour and twenty five minutes of mind-numbing boredom. Due to the frequent utilization of this ill-conceived camera technique, the viewer quickly learns to distinguish when the director wants them to be scared by virtue of the near-epyleptic camera shaking. In this respect, the shaking camera is used as the theatrical equivelent of the "Applause!" signs utilized during the taping of many live television shows, instructing the audience to behave in a certain manner at a certain time. Not surprisingly, a "Be Scared Now!"sign provokes a similarly feigned audience response (accompanied by alternating laughter and groans in the theater where I saw Darkness), revealing a great deal about the film's intrinsic horror value (namely that it doesn't have any). Dear God, the pain! The pain!
Finally, the quality of the acting bears mention. It is, simply put, the most horrifying thing that the film has to offer (aside from the realization that somebody in Hollywood saw fit to finance the film in the first place, naturally). From the overly dramatic and unconvincing portrayal of the mother in denial, to the almost action-movie heroine temperment of the daughter (portrayed by Anna Paquin, ironically), the actors in Darkeness are clearly out of their element when it comes to horror films. In addition to frequently acting in a manner inappropriate for the intended genre of the film, when the actors do make an effort to embrace their characters, they do so by becoming walking horror movie stereotypes (Iain Glen's performance as the father near the end of the film is very reminiscient of Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining). That said, I suspect that Jaume Balaguero had a large influence on the actors' chosen methods of expression, and if his influence on the rest of the film is any indicator, I also supsect that he shoulders most of the blame here. Obviously, the man is a sadist of the highest order, not content with destroying the minds of his audience, he also opted to remove his actor's brains.
In closing, if Darkness isn't (by some sad, future, twist of fate) the worst horror film to grace theaters for more than a decade, it will certainly come close. Failing to shock, surprise, horrify, or otherwise entertain the audience, Darkness falls short of meeting every possible criteria that one would use to judge a horror film (including unintentional comic amusement). Save your money, your time, and your frontal lobe. Skip Darkness.
