The Dark (2005)

Simply A Masterpiece

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is generally overwrought and feels far too long in terms of the limited story it's telling. Despite this, it seems like a lot may have been left on the cutting room floor. There's a lot of darting around in the narrative between the flashbacks and present day, and on focus on certain characters and motifs. The result is a sense that the editors and director have lost control of the movie, and that they can't decide what they want to say or how. A bit of discipline could have helped, maybe forcing out certain elements and stylistic flourishes to keep the narrative more streamlined. I'm thinking especially in the latter part of the film here. At this point I think it goes into too many horror film territories, as if deciding it has to appeal to more eclectic and contemporary tastes.The acting is appalling from the three female characters, two of whom are children - though the worst is from Maria Bello. The fact there is the arbitrary American in order to boost the film's transatlantic profile we'll gloss over. Why does she have to scream, shout, and thrash around so much? You feel a lack of sympathy with her, and her daughter. When the film ramps up in the later stages the child actors really overact. Direction could be partly to blame on this front. Sean Bean manages his usual capable and impassioned job, and is believable. Also good is the understated and studied handyman character. In conclusion, this is a mess with a lot of shouting, running, swimming and smashing things. The rather underused Welsh mythology concept could have been developed better within the piece, making for a less generic horror film. Crucially it isn't scary, or interesting, or emotionally moving. You're soon looking to see how long is left and considering making a cup of tea.

The Dark.I'm not usually a fan of this type of movie, preferring romantic comedies and character-based movies, but it really is a faultless piece. The cinematography and art direction are subtle but remarkably beautiful, with alchemical hues and some noir-ish moments reminiscent of Nostalgia. There are moments of homage – Don't Look Now, for example, with the child in red. Scare-mares I can usually forgo but this film takes the viewer on a loop-within-loop journey that is intriguing and whirls, dervishly with the mind. The cast are sterling stuff, too. A big shout to Christian Sebaldt, the cinematographer, to John Fawcett the director and to Stephen Massicotte and Simon Maginn the two screenwriters. Scary daughters……….or in this case scary ghost-daughters of rugged-coastline sheepfarmers, are another familiar element, but there is nothing predictable about this state-of-the-art thriller/horror/shocker. Maybe I'm coming around to becoming a fan of this genre………..gonna put some cocoa on now and listen to a friendly album.

I thought that this was quite a good film. It is about a woman called Adèlle who is visiting her husband James in Wales , she tries to fix her relationship with her teenager daughter Sarah. Whilst they are there they see a weird memorial without the plate and with the name "Annwyn" marked on it. One of The local men explains that this would be the place where people go after dying according to the Welsh mythology. Later on somehow Sarah vanishes on the beach James and his wife Adelle are frantic to find out where she may be. Eventually they find the daughter of the local fanatic shepherd, Ebrill, who died fifty years ago,appears in place of Sarah Adele trys to find out how to rescue her daughter from Annway.

Look, I would just like to add my voice to this. I wrote the novel, Sheep. The film is 'adapted' from my book the exact same way a pile of rubble is 'adapted' from a house. My book is a slow, serious thriller on the theme of contamination, of land, of food, of livestock, and of minds. It is about ritual purity, conformism and the category-error that is literal biblical belief. It is, in short, about something. None (NONE!) of the filmmakers had read it, they just had a script based on another script, and were highly indignant when my agent suggested they actually read the original.The film takes some of the visual gestures that animate the book (sheep diseases, religious mania etc), but then scoops out all the surrounding connective tissue, everything that makes the book make sense, replacing it with some kind of pulp which looks to me as if the writer was shaken violently awake in the middle of the night and asked to regurgitate the story lines from the last five horror movies he had seen, except his notes got all scrambled up - the result being a sort of plot-pudding, full of screaming and running about and unexplained (unexplainable) twists. No disrespect to anyone, and I know what sort of pressures the screenwriter was under, but the film does not, in any sense, 'adapt' Sheep, the novel. Sheep is a careful, thoughtful book, with a meticulously worked plot. It is also (I am informed) scary (one reviewer said it was the only thing he had ever read which did actually scare him), which the film of course, despite its most strenuous efforts, fails completely to be. The book is not about some vague Disneyfied version of Welsh mythology (nice and safe and distant in these troubled times), it is about Christianity, the Bible: about what happens when religion turns to madness. The scariness is in the waiting, the hinting, the accumulation of detail, drip by drip. It is about fearing, dreading, while something unfolds which cannot be understood until it is too late. I may not have succeeded in any of this, but I was trying. The film just flaps about from one random thing to another, papering over the cracks with tiresome 'shock' effects and Maria Bello screaming.Copies of Sheep are hard to track down now without paying a lot of money, but I would love it if the people who were disappointed in the film were to read the book. Please don't judge the book (or any of my other books) because you didn't like The Dark: there is almost nothing connecting the two things. Give the book a try: you'll be surprised.Thanks for your time.