Mark Reviews Movies: DARKNESS FALLS (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 11, 2020

Darkness Falls isn't just an incompetent thriller. Everything about it seems alien to any understanding of thrillers, police procedure, psychology, and just basic human interactions and behavior.

The screenplay for this fiasco comes from Giles Daoust, who starts with a somewhat intriguing premise. A pair of father-son serial killers (played by Gary Cole and Richard Harmon) are disguising their murders as suicides. They specifically target successful women, and their most recent victim—whose torturous killing is portrayed in questionable length—is the wife of a Los Angeles police detective named Jeff Anderson (Shawn Ashmore).

Anderson is convinced his wife was murdered and spends six months stalking other suicide scenes, looking for some connection to his wife's death (He has a beard after the prologue—the universal and clichéd way to show that time has passed and things aren't well). After an over-the-top scene in which he tries to get inside the minds of the killers (writing "I hate you" on photographs of the victims before yelling the same thing at the photos), he comes up a theory that is dismissed by his former partner/friend (played by Daniella Alonso), who is now the department's captain.

Much of director Julien Seri's approach is over-the-top, from the bombastic score that accompanies even the most trivial of shots/scenes (It pummels us from the opening establishing shots and never lets up) to the performances. Ashmore is particularly unconvincing, but then again, so, too, are fine actors like Cole, who's more bored than psychologically detached, and Lin Shaye, who plays Anderson's constantly antagonistic mother.

By the way, the mother's attitude flips entirely when her son, after months of telling her that he's convinced his wife was murdered without a lick of evidence, tells her, without a lick of evidence, that he's slightly more convinced his wife was murdered. Suddenly, without any logical or emotional reason, the woman who scolded her son for obsessing over a theory and ignoring his own son (played by Judah Mackey) is encouraging him to obsess over the same theory, even if it means ignoring his son. You can't fake that lack of understanding, so how is an actor supposed to convincingly play a character from such a void of a foundation?

It almost doesn't matter how bad Ashmore is here (There's a scene in which Anderson figures out the killers' motive, and we're watching the actor actively try to portray thinking—with a string of looks that seem to be asking, "Did I leave the stove on?"—instead of just, you know, thinking). When everyone else in a movie is just as lost, that level of failure is on the terrible writing and mismanaged directing.

To list all of the movie's many and assorted narrative failures would be a fool's errand. Here are some anyway:

· The killers' repeatedly contradictory modus operandi makes no sense—hating successful women for ignoring their familial duties but killing single women and Anderson's wife, who's an attentive mother—despite the multiple scenes of Cole's character explaining it to Anderson (After these lengthy monologues about the killers' reasons, the cop, in an amusingly confounding moment, still asks the younger killer why he's a killer).

· The cop's son lets himself be abducted by one of the killers (You'd think a cop's kid would be aware of "stranger danger"), only to turn down a sleeping pill because his grandmother told him not to accept anything from strangers (meaning he is aware of "stranger danger").

· At one point, Anderson gives his pistol to one of the killers to help him escape from police custody (You could ask why, but the explanation makes even less sense in the context of the story), and then is shocked when the killer uses it (What did you think was going to happen, buddy?).

The whole affair falls apart at the screenplay level. Just as we can more or less forgive the actors for their poor performances, we can almost understand Seri's instinct for trying to amplify every element of the filmmaking in Darkness Falls. It's all a giant distraction (In addition to the music and performances, there are also a few stylistic flourishes—long takes and a stakeout montage in which the backdrop changes while Anderson sits in his car). If one piles enough junk, maybe people won't notice the few pieces that started the mess.

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