Mark Reviews Movies: DARBY AND THE DEAD

Darby and the Dead, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

The idea of a kind of therapist for ghosts with unfinished business sounds like a promising one. It's too bad Darby and the Dead, which offers up that setup at the start, doesn't seem to believe likewise.

Instead, we get a movie that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be or how it wants to be it. Add this one to always-growing pile of movies with inspired premises that don't take advantage of them, deserving of some kind of remake or re-do or re-hash at some point down the line (This isn't to stretch too far beyond the role of critic, but some network, cable, or streaming service employee probably could get on an executive's good side by suggesting this premise would be ideal for a standalone television series).

The initial gimmick revolves around the abilities of one Darby Harper (Riele Downs), a seemingly ordinary teenage loner who's hiding a big secret. She can see, as well as hear and talk to, dead people. As a kid, she briefly died after being pulled down by some undertow on the beach. Although someone revived her, the end for Darby's mother, who was playing next to her at the time, was final. As a result of her near-death experience, Darby can interact with ghosts, and she has a volunteer job, which she dubs social work to prevent people from asking too many questions, helping those spirits resolve the unfinished business of life and pass on to the other side.

All of this is solid, inventive, and filled with promise, although the increasingly clunky nature of Becca Greene's screenplay begins with the narrative's swapping between voice-over narration and fourth-wall breaking, as well as how the prologue rushes through the very work that makes Darby's situation so intriguing. Instead, Darby really is just a loner, unpopular and ignored, and although she says she's happy with that, there was a time that her best friend was Capri (Auli'i Cravalho), the most popular girl in school, the head cheerleader, and the girlfriend of Darby's childhood crush James (Asher Angel).

From all of this discussion and sarcasm about popularity in and the social hierarchy of high school, one might start to wonder what all of that has to do with our protagonist's supernatural side gig. Darby does have a couple of ghostly clients—namely Gary (Tony Danza), who's waiting for his wife to die so they can cross over together, and his formerly living pal Mel (Wayne Knight)—to remind us of what seems to be story's central gimmick, but as improbable as it might seem from the inventiveness of the setup, the whole plot gradually turns into something far more predictable and formulaic.

Capri dies in an electrocution accident, and obviously, the ghost of the cheerleader, who finds her former friend as distasteful as our ghost-seer finds her, appears before Darby, hoping to return to the world of the living. Since that's impossible, Capri instead decides that she should try to remain as popular in death as she was in life, so she asks Darby to ensure that Capri's upcoming birthday bash go on as planned. In order to convince Capri's friends to pull that off and the school to want to attend, Darby is going to have to become popular for reasons that seem to be forcing this material into a the realm of cliché more than anything else.

The plot transforms into something out of a throwback high school comedy (Darby even starts wearing her mother's "retro" clothes from the 1990s), complete with a makeover montage of the dead Capri transforming our socially and fashionably apathetic protagonist into a social and fashion butterfly, a less-than-biting satire about how shallow the cool kids can be, the revelation that being popular both is hard work and isn't as fulfilling as it appears, and a pair of boys, who clearly like Darby, for her to like, too. One is James, of course, who grieves alone in his bedroom for weeks (This feels like a stretch of whatever mourning policy the school has in place, but it definitely delays the conflict between Darby and Capri for the third act).

The other is Alex (Chosen Jacobs), the new kid in school who's as much of an outsider as Darby. That, obviously, means she can't be seen spending time with him, if Darby wants to maintain her new social status.

Apart from Capri (who quickly learns how to manipulate the physical world for a couple of gags and to force Darby when she has doubts) and those two other ghosts, there's no sign of the story as promised at the beginning. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that kind of bait-and-switch tactic, except that the bait here is far more intriguing than the generic switch the screenplay attempts. Darby and the Dead isn't all a loss, if only because of its occasionally dark sense of humor and a couple of charming performances (mainly Downs and Cravalho), but it's impossible not to wonder what might have been if the filmmakers had stuck to the strength of their gimmick.

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