Dark

Dark is one of the most uninteresting movies about someone having a mental breakdown I’ve ever seen.

Dark is the story of a mentally unstable woman named Kate. In the first few minutes of the movie, we learn Kate is queer due to a lengthy lesbian sex scene with some bad undertones. After this, we see Kate work as a yoga instructor and actually talk to her girlfriend, Leah. Leah and Kate have some sort of unspecified tension and Kate specifically doesn’t seem interesting in communicating problems. Then, Leah leaves for the weekend and that’s the last queer content in the film.

After Leah leaves, Kate notices that traffic lights and her apartment are without power. The 2003 New York black out has begun. Kate meets with a neighbour who invites her to a club. At the club, Kate meets another guy named Benoit. Kate drunkenly returns to her apartment and her breakdown amps up another level. From here on, we see Kate struggling with her mental health which is exacerbated without external stimulus. We learn that she has previously attempted suicide, was committed and has some problems with identity stemming from her former career as a model. The film ends with Kate maybe killing someone or maybe not.

Dark is a slow, boring movie. The big problem is there’s no sense of mounting tension or dread. I spent the whole movie waiting for something to happen which never occurred. Even as Kate’s breakdown ramps up and she gets to a place of maybe being dangerous to herself or others, there’s still no tension. Things just happen in this film. There’s little rhyme or reason and it doesn’t feel like it amounts to anything.

In addition to the lack of atmosphere, the other thing that made this film boring was the main character. Kate is a bland, blank slate of a character who is initially neither likeable, sympathetic nor interesting. And she doesn’t improve over time. Whether this was a choice of acting or directing to make this character so blank and unknowable, it was a mistake. Even when Kate starts breaking down it’s still boring to watch. If nothing else, Dark would have been improved if its lead performance was more over the top. This is a character experiencing a mental breakdown in a shitty thriller film. The time for subtly is not now. the movie still would’ve sucked but it would have been more watchable if they’d had the lead character played by an actress who made a meal out of this role.

The queer content in Dark is minimal. It’s just establishing that Kate has a girlfriend and that they have sex that Kate has undetermined feelings about. Once Leah leaves the movie, Kate’s unspecified difficult relationship to sex and sexuality is depicted in her relationships with men. The best thing I can say about the queer content is that it’s not any worse than the rest of the movie. True equality in Dark is that everything is bad in the same way.

Dark is a boring, pointless movie. It’s just about a woman who has a girlfriend and experiences a mental breakdown during a black out. It’s neither thrilling nor is it a successful dramatic portrait of mental illness. Dark is just watching a character you don’t care about do random stuff for 90 minutes and have a bad time of it. There’s absolutely no reason to seek this movie out.

Overall rating: 2.7/10

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