ORION AND THE DARK - Mark Reviews Movies

Orion and the Dark, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 1, 2024

An imaginative and free-wheeling story about the importance of stories, it's little surprise to discover that Orion and the Dark comes from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, whose writing career could be broadly summarized as variations on that theme. Here, though, Kaufman adapts Emma Yarlett's children's book, which means the material is much sweeter and safer than we've come to expect from the screenwriter. That doesn't make this rumination on fear and the meaning of storytelling any less clever.

The medium helps in this instance. This is a computer-animated film, brought to life by director Sean Charmatz and a team of artists who bring a familiar but distinct style to the proceedings. Some of these ideas seem only feasible by way of animation, and even if that weren't the case, there's something intrinsically comforting in seeing cartoon-like character and figures in such a tale.

That's vital, because Kaufman is approaching notions that are likely going to feel a little too real for a lot of kids—and, if we're being completely honest, a good number of adults, too. The aesthetic of this film becomes like a warm, soft blanket against the harshness of everyday anxieties, primal worries, and the open questioning that maybe stories don't possess any kind of easy solution to or simple lesson for such problems.

They certainly don't seem like a fix for Orion (voice of Jacob Tremblay), our anxiety-riddled protagonist. He's about 10 years old or so and spends most of his day at school worrying about doing something embarrassing, being judged by his classmates, and succumbing to some other kind of disaster.

Poor Orion is scared of everything—as in-his-face as the school bully, as ordinary as bees, as unlikely as clogging a school toilet and causing terrible flood. At home, things aren't much better, because Orion can just linger on all the things that went wrong during the day, such as how he can't bring himself to talk to his crush, and on everything that could go wrong the next day.

Night is the worst for the kid, though. That's when his mind wanders to literally and figurative darker things, such as what could be hiding in his closet and what death will be like. In case it somehow isn't clear yet, this is pretty mature and thoughtful material for an animated film aimed at kids (Charmatz has even enlisted Werner Herzog to provide his unmistakably stern intonations as a narrator in a couple of scenes). The notion of treating children as smart and sensitive enough to both recognize and handle such matters is admirable.

Anyway, Orion finds himself facing his biggest fear on this particular night, when the dark comes to life. Yes, Dark (voice of Paul Walter Hauser) is the personification of his name, a hulking figure of misty form and dressed in a heavy cloak. He looks scary, as one might anticipate, but once Dark starts talking, he turns out to be just as insecure and concerned about what people think of him as Orion.

The plot starts with predictable simplicity, as Dark decides that the best way to cure Orion of the kid's fear of him and what he represents is to take the boy along on Dark's nightly around-the-globe trip. From there, the kid meets Dark's associates, figures of the night who need darkness to do what they do. They're as obvious as Sleep (voice of Natasia Demetriou), whose tactics to induce slumber only look sinister and/or violent, and Quiet (voice of Aparna Nancherla), a little mouse whose mouth serves as a vacuum for noise, and Sweet Dreams (voice of Angela Bassett), who can summon mental visions out of nothing and becomes quite irritated when Orion's neuroses invade her pleasant scenarios. A couple others are fine gags, such as Unexplained Noises (voice of Golda Rosheuvel), who makes what the name says, and Insomnia (voice of Nat Faxon), who keeps people up at night with unpleasant thoughts and recordings of some humiliating thing a person said decades ago.

All of this is fun, funny, and full of smart, knowing touches, while the animation is simple enough to ease us into the weirdness but detailed enough to bring those more abstract ideas to vibrant life. In the main story, Dark tries to convince Orion not to be scared of him, while also outpacing the encroaching, cheery Light (voice of Ike Barinholtz). The tactic kind of works, but Kaufman's screenplay throws a significant wrench into what seems to be the straightforward works of this innocent bedtime-style story.

That's the recognition this is nothing more than a bedtime story, full of holes and inconsistencies and the evasion of a pretty basic truth. That truth is the fact that an adult Orion (voice of Colin Hanks), who's the one telling and/or making up this tale, is still afraid of the dark in some way. If that's the case, does this story actually matter? Maybe, the listener suggests, it would be better if Orion take a more honest approach—one that acknowledges the shortcomings of fables for offering life-changing lessons. It can't be and never is that easy.

With that development, Orion and the Dark expands its view. It's a bit too much in trying to advance and resolve the story being told, but that, ultimately, isn't really the point here. By the time we realize what Kaufman is doing within the larger narrative, the film becomes an affecting piece about the act of storytelling as a means of connection—one that spans and transcends generations.

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