The Dark (2005) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

Modest, unsatisfying, cliched, but moderately creepy horror film, not to be confused the the 1979 William Devane-Casey Kasem classic featuring a rampaging alien in a rubber suit. Directed by John Fawcett, who made one of the decade’s few horror classics, Ginger Snaps. This one has both some of that film’s assurance and tensile grip on raw narrative, but it swaps between unnerving John Carpenter-esque poise and contemporary visual gibberish. It draws heavily on the very dark nature of Welsh myth which also, lest we forget, give the early Halloween films some of their pep. Mario Bello plays a slightly obnoxious lady with an estranged husband, played by an unusually well-adjusted Sean Bean, and a resentful daughter. When resentful daughter goes missing, apparently drowned, Bello’s guilt over causing her daughter’s near-suicide months before boils up. Then the couple are visited by a girl who seems to be the long-lost daughter of a crazy priest, a warped, pagan dubbed “The Shepherd” who once, in the ’50s, inspired his whole congregation to throw themselves over a cliff, and who may are may not have returned from “Annwn”, the Welsh mythological netherworld, with hope for their own daughter’s return. Or is the Shepherd manipulating them in representing some twisted purpose of the dark forces of Annwn? It’s highly reminiscent of The Ring in many ways, and actually rather better, in that it has a narrative rather than a bag of blockbuster tricks. It’s often painfully similar to many recent genre entries, and yet it holds it own, and the final image, with Bello locked in said netherworld at the mercy of…something, is perhaps the most effectively eerie climax in any recent horror film.