Darkest Night

IMDb
A family gathers for a happy reunion and marriageannouncement on Christmas Day at an isolated mansion in the Philippine mountains only to encounter a series of bizarre, demonic, and tragic events.


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Darkest Night begins with a news reporter standing in front of what is supposed to be the ruins of a house. Found in the ruins is a video tape and so we are then treated to an edited version of said tape to show us what happened to the family that was there. The tape shows a Christmas celebration, as an extended family gathers to catch up, enjoy good food and spend some time together. Everything is going swimmingly until after dinner the house appears to be hit by an earthquake. An inky-black darkness descends upon the house and anything electrical ceases to operate except for the video camera and the TV that keeps showing fuzzy images of people even after being unplugged. At first the family does not suspect too much is out of the ordinary until family members begin to act strangely and even disappear. Things quickly escalate until the family’s terrible secrets are revealed.

If that plot synopsis seemed vague, there is a good excuse. This movie is almost incomprehensible for much of it’s run time. Why is Darkest Night so difficult to follow? Firstly, the film has practically no lighting once the power goes out. Forced to use oil lanterns, we see things pretty much exactly as the characters do. Now while this might provide some authenticity to the footage, it also makes things very difficult to make out, especially when there’s any amount of motion involved. Characters are running around yelling and screaming and the camera doesn’t even attempt to keep up. Even when going for a faux-home movie style you’re still making a filmand the viewer needs to be able to follow what’s happening. What makes matters worse is this movie has a surprisingly large cast for a found footage offering, which muddies the waters further. There are so many bodies running around in the dark, disappearing and reappearing with little rhyme or reason, that it is impossible to know whether the fate of each character is eventually known or not. If the director wanted to confuse the crap out of the viewer then mission accomplished.

There are all of these bizarre inconsistencies that make one wonder if this film was originally written to be found footage or just became that because they only had one camera. There are scenes where characters stand side-by-side looking at each other delivering boring and pointless exposition to each other which don’t even attempt to give the appearance of being “organic” as we have come to expect in found footage movies. There are also random scenes where a character’s dialog is subtitled, sometimes it is because the character is speaking French but there were also scenes where the dialog is muffled but in English and it is subtitled. However there are then other scenes you can’t hear what anybody is saying properly but they don’t bother subtitling it. The film also does a poor job of establishing one of the key requirements of a found footage movie: justifying why everything is being recorded. A character named Chelsea is carrying the camera at first but then it is passed to a teenager called Justin after about 15 minutes. I believe reference is made to the fact that Justin doesn’t talk much and they weren’t kidding! Justin witnesses people vanishing before his eyes, he quietly watches characters get killed and there’s never a peep out of him to any other character he sees. Is Justin possessed? Perhaps. Does Justin just hate his family and wants them all to die? Having sat through this whole movie this would be very understandable

Darkest Night then commits what some may consider a cardnal sin, it has music. The whole point of Found Footage movies is that the viewer becomes a participant in the horrors on-screen because it’s not viewed from the traditional “safe” third person view of a film camera. So why ruin this stripped down experience by adding “scary music” right before anything happens? It stops this movie from managing ANY scares because the musical cues make sure you know they’re coming. Not that you can even really see most of the scary stuff due to the non-existent lighting and the one time you do get a clear view of something happening it is unintentionally hilarious.

Whatever reasons exist for why this movie is such an incomprehensible mess, the fact that it uses the found footage genre as a way out of having to put any care into it’s production is a very poor excuse. Darkest Night attempts authenticity but instead just induces headaches and boredom. Perhaps it’s time this whole sub-genre gets put in timeout for a while.

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