Darkness

DARKNESS

A film that premiered in Spain in 2002 but was not released in the United States until 2004, Darkness boasts a downright Lovecraftian ending and a story that blends aspects of the haunted house genre with a drama about a nuclear family of four that spins into dysfunction when the father becomes mentally unstable.  A teen girl (Regina) moves to an isolated house in Spain with her younger brother (Paul), her mother (Maria), and her father (Mark).  Regina, who has befriended a local fellow (Carlos) during her first three weeks in her new home, regularly swims at a community pool.  Mark (like Jack Torrance in The Shining) grows irritable, unpredictable, and eventually violent.  Meanwhile, Paul repeatedly draws six children with red slashes across their throats, and he sees kids in the darkness and develops bruises on his neck.  Regina (for no discernable reason) begins to suspect that the house is somehow causing all of her family’s problems.  She and Carlos research the house, visit its architect, and follow a trail of clues that lead them to conclude that the place was the site of an attempted occult ritual forty years earlier, and that someone is about to attempt the ritual again because a certain type of eclipse that only rolls around every forty years is about to occur.  The ritual involves seven children having their throats slit “by loving hands.”  I can’t summarize the plot any further without spoiling the best parts.      

Though flawed in some ways, Darkness contains plentiful spooky imagery and a unique enough story to make it worth a watch.  The tale includes some narrative hiccups that made me laugh (like when Carlos fails to mention to Regina that he developed a photo of her and saw children in the background who were not present when he snapped the picture and when Regina and Paul escape from the house where all hell is breaking loose and leave their mom to fend for herself).  Also, there’s a scene that involves research at a library in which Regina and Carlos track down information about the occult ritual in quick and convenient fashion.  There’s a subplot about Regina’s hobby of swimming that goes nowhere (I assumed that in the third act Regina would have to swim somewhere other than a pool).  Despite these complaints, I liked Darkness overall.  Original horror movies with disturbing endings are rare.  This one’s worth a look.