The opening scene of ONLY DARKNESS finds a woman being stalked in her apartment by an unseen strangler and features heavy use of canted angles and extreme color gels, with one exemplary shot bathing a stairway in cool blue while rooms above and below glow green and red. Already impressed with the film's style and feeling like I had stumbled onto a lost giallo, I was delighted when the next scene found the film's screenwriter protagonist discussing the ins and outs of that genre with his agent. Clearly, I was among friends.
While over-stylized throwbacks to the Italian thriller have become an eye-rolling cliche recently (think KNIFE IN THE HEART, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, etc.), ONLY DARKNESS is the earliest example I've seen, and by far the least pretentious. This is a film clearly besotted with the genre and trying to find something interesting to do with it, so it's a shame it ends up floundering as much as it does. The opening third is surprisingly engaging even while cliched: Paul, the hero mentioned above, is a British author sick of cranking out lurid sex-and-gore mysteries for a group of Italian financiers and desperate to put his creativity toward loftier artistic goals. He and his agent engage in that age-old (and eye rolling) cliché, the debate on art vs. Commerciality.
Paul gets his creative break driving home, when a pretty young woman darts out in front of his car. No sooner does he bundle her into the backseat, however, then he finds she's being chased by a strange man in a rain slicker and cap, who sends the two dashing to a nearby cottage. Discovering a dead body inside, Paul ends up held at gunpoint, forced to hack at the corpse with an axe before managing to wrestle the gun away and escape. Taking the woman back to his place, Paul is seized with inspiration for a new script; unfortunately, inspiration isn't the only thing he's brought back, as the two find themselves once again stalked by the mysterious assailant.
As set-ups go, you could do a lot worse, and while the film's influences often feel explicit (both NIGHT OF THE HUNTED and THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE inflect things strongly), it nevertheless manages to make them feel its own. Unfortunately, once the set-up is over, the film seems to have no idea where to go: the mysterious young female is never characterized or made interesting, and the movie becomes mired in the day-to-day minutia of Paul's life, with subsequent killings (there are only two) feeling both gratuitous and like afterthoughts. Narrative elements like Paul falling off the wagon come out of nowhere and have minimal impact, while the story overall just seems stuck in the mud.
(SPOILERS)
Unfortunately, it's only at the end that the film really reveals the extent to which it has no idea what it's doing. The denouement, which finds Paul cornering the killer at the cottage, reveals the man is actually the girl's father trying to protect her: she suffered a sexual trauma years earlier, which was re-triggered by a symbolic object and sent her flying into a murderous frenzy - she was the one who killed the guy in the cottage, not her dad, and he was trying to stop her. Aside from the fact this backstory is ripped off wholesale from THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, it also opens numerous holes: if the father is just concerned with protecting his daughter, why does he kill several people? And why didn't the young woman display any signs of being dangerous when she was with Paul?
(END SPOILERS)
The result is a real misfire, made all the worse given it has such a promising opening. Directors Jon Kirby and Mitchell Morgan clearly know the words to the genre but not the music, cheekily playing off its aesthetic flourishes while totally failing to craft a satisfying (or even coherent) narrative. To make matters worse, the film's stylistic affectations are schizophrenic, with the elegant lighting of the giallo set-ups clashing violently against cringe-inducing '90s visual tics. Overall, the cinematography is quite good (nicely shot on what looks like 16mm) but gets done a painful disservice by things like split-screens that use the technique to disorienting rather than stylized effect. The less said about the score, by some band called Rachel's Basement (no, I've never heard of them either), the better - this anodyne corner-bar soft rock would fit better over the opening of a CW series than it does here. ONLY DARKNESS at least scores points in terms of ambition, and is laudable for taking bold swings, but while there's obvious talent on display, the film would do well to take the advice of its talent agent sidekick: more blood & sex, less artsy-fartsy BS.
While over-stylized throwbacks to the Italian thriller have become an eye-rolling cliche recently (think KNIFE IN THE HEART, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, etc.), ONLY DARKNESS is the earliest example I've seen, and by far the least pretentious. This is a film clearly besotted with the genre and trying to find something interesting to do with it, so it's a shame it ends up floundering as much as it does. The opening third is surprisingly engaging even while cliched: Paul, the hero mentioned above, is a British author sick of cranking out lurid sex-and-gore mysteries for a group of Italian financiers and desperate to put his creativity toward loftier artistic goals. He and his agent engage in that age-old (and eye rolling) cliché, the debate on art vs. Commerciality.
Paul gets his creative break driving home, when a pretty young woman darts out in front of his car. No sooner does he bundle her into the backseat, however, then he finds she's being chased by a strange man in a rain slicker and cap, who sends the two dashing to a nearby cottage. Discovering a dead body inside, Paul ends up held at gunpoint, forced to hack at the corpse with an axe before managing to wrestle the gun away and escape. Taking the woman back to his place, Paul is seized with inspiration for a new script; unfortunately, inspiration isn't the only thing he's brought back, as the two find themselves once again stalked by the mysterious assailant.
As set-ups go, you could do a lot worse, and while the film's influences often feel explicit (both NIGHT OF THE HUNTED and THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE inflect things strongly), it nevertheless manages to make them feel its own. Unfortunately, once the set-up is over, the film seems to have no idea where to go: the mysterious young female is never characterized or made interesting, and the movie becomes mired in the day-to-day minutia of Paul's life, with subsequent killings (there are only two) feeling both gratuitous and like afterthoughts. Narrative elements like Paul falling off the wagon come out of nowhere and have minimal impact, while the story overall just seems stuck in the mud.
(SPOILERS)
Unfortunately, it's only at the end that the film really reveals the extent to which it has no idea what it's doing. The denouement, which finds Paul cornering the killer at the cottage, reveals the man is actually the girl's father trying to protect her: she suffered a sexual trauma years earlier, which was re-triggered by a symbolic object and sent her flying into a murderous frenzy - she was the one who killed the guy in the cottage, not her dad, and he was trying to stop her. Aside from the fact this backstory is ripped off wholesale from THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, it also opens numerous holes: if the father is just concerned with protecting his daughter, why does he kill several people? And why didn't the young woman display any signs of being dangerous when she was with Paul?
(END SPOILERS)
The result is a real misfire, made all the worse given it has such a promising opening. Directors Jon Kirby and Mitchell Morgan clearly know the words to the genre but not the music, cheekily playing off its aesthetic flourishes while totally failing to craft a satisfying (or even coherent) narrative. To make matters worse, the film's stylistic affectations are schizophrenic, with the elegant lighting of the giallo set-ups clashing violently against cringe-inducing '90s visual tics. Overall, the cinematography is quite good (nicely shot on what looks like 16mm) but gets done a painful disservice by things like split-screens that use the technique to disorienting rather than stylized effect. The less said about the score, by some band called Rachel's Basement (no, I've never heard of them either), the better - this anodyne corner-bar soft rock would fit better over the opening of a CW series than it does here. ONLY DARKNESS at least scores points in terms of ambition, and is laudable for taking bold swings, but while there's obvious talent on display, the film would do well to take the advice of its talent agent sidekick: more blood & sex, less artsy-fartsy BS.
