Film Reviews

The Dark

• Rating:
• Director: John Fawcett
• Starring: Abigal Stone
• Details: US. 93mins, 15s.

Although separated from her husband James (Bean), Adele (Bello) still has a good relationship with him and to patch things up with her ten-year-old daughter Sarah (Stuckey) after a big fight, she concedes to visit him in his remote cottage in the Welsh countryside. Once there, Sarah begins to have hallucinations and nightmares of sheep jumping off a cliff close to the cottage but before she can launch an investigation, she drowns. As they search for her body, James and Adele are visited by Ebrill (Stone) - the ghost of a ten-year-old girl, who died on the same spot years earlier, with stories of an evil afterlife.
Since one of the first lines in The Dark is "Top o' the mornin' to ya" (an Irish expression, lads - not a Welsh one) it shows the lack of thought gone into The Dark which is ultimately a poorly acted, formulaic, lazy, boring horror story with the only goose pimple raised is in sympathetic embarrassment for the director because his family can't meet his eyes after the premiere. Fawcett brought this humiliation on himself as Bean, who is a good actor in his own right, is never pushed to up his game beyond the nonchalant script while Bello is consigned to the usual "Hello?" and "Is anyone there?" With 'scary' lines like "This is where the sheep come to die" (along with the viewer's patience), The Dark is not a horror or a psychological thriller but just a bunch of stuff that happens, and the only fear you'll feel is whether or not you'll get your money back after ripping up the cinema seats in the name of film.

Review by Gavin Burke