DARK MATCH - Mark Reviews Movies

Dark Match, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2025

In Dark Match, a small-time wrestling association gets an offer that seems too good to be true, but because the operation is so minor, it's a proposition the group's manager can't refuse. Obviously, things will go wrong in writer/director Lowell Dean's movie, and the only question is just how wrong things will go.

There's not much surprise to Dean's movie, in other words, especially when it becomes obvious that these wrestlers are literally fighting for their lives. At that point, it's only a matter of how gruesome the deaths here will be. For what it's worth, they're pretty grisly, to be sure.

The straightforward story follows the stars of this B-level wrestling federation in the late 1980s. Our de facto protagonist is a wrestler named Nick (Ayisha Issa), who has the clever stage name Miss Behave. She's a multi-level underdog among the group and within the sport more generally, as a regular contender against the few other women in the league, including crowd favorite Kate the Great (Sara Canning), and a Black woman at a time in the sport when the audience seems to reject her talent and, more broadly, her before she even enters the ring.

The movie's look is certainly right, beyond its occasional cuts to VHS-style footage of assorted matches. Dean and cinematographer Karim Hussain give the movie a grainy, grungy quality that makes it feel like some lost item from the era of the story's setting. In those early scenes of the wrestlers doing their business in the ring and going through professional or personal drama behind the scenes, that appearance adds to a sense of rough-and-tumble authenticity, and once the real violence begins, the movie almost provides the feeling that we're watching something taboo—much like the eponymous tournament that comes to drive the plot.

That comes after Rusty (Jonathan Cherry), the desperate manager of this plucky association of wrestlers, gets a call that could save his struggling business. It draws a crowd, but producing a show—paying the wrestlers and the price of recording matches that aren't selling—is costly. Some anonymous person offers him thousands of dollars for his best wrestlers to come out to the middle of nowhere for a series of "dark matches"—ones that aren't recorded because the fighting might become a little intense. That's an understatement here.

Apart from Nick and Kate, the other wrestlers Rusty picks are the silently mysterious Enigma Jones (Mo Adan), who wears a mask wherever he goes, and the federation's biggest star Joe Lean (Steven Ogg). He's a long-timer who's also dating Nick in secret—lest any of those fans think less of him for some of the same reasons that Miss Behave hasn't broken through in even this little operation.

There's some intriguing material about the characters and politics of this league near the start, but of course, it amounts to little as soon as the group gets a van, drives to that remote location, and discovers a cut-off community that seems to have something other than wrestling on its mind. They're led by a man who simply calls himself "the Leader," and in the confusion and revelry of a welcoming party, Joe is convinced that he recognizes that man, who stands over his flock and refers to them as his "children."

Joe's familiarity with the guy, by the way, is not because the Leader is played by real-life professional wrestler Chris Jericho, although the casting is a smarter gimmick than it might first seem. The character's motive for separating himself from the world and legitimate wrestling is probably something the pro knows too well.

The rest of the plot is mostly an excuse for bloodbath after bloodbath. The planned matches are themed after the four classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire, pitting some of the outsider wrestlers against each other or ones in this cult against an industrial fan built into the base of the ring, a sprinkler system above it, a mound of dirt filled with broken glass, and a fire pit and some flamethrowers. Blood spills from real hits. Throats are sliced, sending a whirlwind of the red stuff into the air. Necks are snapped, and one wrestler almost seems drawn to the flame.

Again, though, all of this is pretty much assumed to be the case, as soon as our first wrestlers realize their in-house opponents aren't doing some routine choreography, and the whole thing becomes a series of violent confrontations between characters who only seem to exist in the story for such violence to occur. Nick does catch on pretty quickly, once she realizes her colleagues are being "protected" by armed guards, but the inevitable escape attempt seems surprisingly half-hearted, only to become quite hasty and contrived once the movie gets through its advertised matches.

Speaking of hasty, there's also the final plot point of Dark Match, which escalates the stakes to something beyond wrestling or even mortal combat. It's an admittedly goofy development, but after so much predictable bloodletting, the over-the-top and out-of-nowhere moment is a bit refreshing—if far too brief and, ultimately, anticlimactic.

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