I feel that Sam Freeman's directorial debut - Don't Look in the Dark, is going to be a divisive movie. This found footage horror took home the award for 'Best Feature' at the Birmingham Horror Film Festival & Convention, but my thoughts on it are far from positive. This is a film for people who saw Skinamarink and decided it didn't go far enough, also for people who thought The Blair Witch Project felt too staged. That isn't to say this wasn't an effective horror, it does some brave things that really should be commended, it just really wasn't for me.
It begins with the familiar white text on a black screen stating that what is about to be shown is recovered footage. It comes from a couple who went hiking in the Pinelands National Reserve on 4th April 2022. The couple; Italian Golan (Dennis Puglisi in his feature length debut) and his American pregnant wife; Maya (Rebi Paganini - Un-Speak-Able) are there to follow a hiking trail that Maya used to go on with her father when she was a child, in tribute to him now the man has passed. While deep on their hike, Maya believes she sees a young child off in the trees, and fearing for its safety, she decides to go and check that the kid is ok. There is no one where she thought she saw it, but hearing a child's voice in the distance, she heads off on a mad pursuit of it, much to the bemusement of Golan, who neither sees or hears it. Sometime later, the two have neither found the child, nor do they know where they are anymore. Their journey is somehow making them walk round in circles, with them constantly coming back to a huge overturned tree, each time, the hole under the tree has gotten deeper and deeper, and Maya feels a strange force compelling her to climb into the hole.
As well as the opening lines setting up the basis for the footage, it also states that everything shown is exactly as it was found, with nothing added. An old complaint of found footage films was why the person recording continued to record once everything went to Hell. Here, this is resolved in a satisfying way. The footage here is being recorded outside of the protagonists control. Their phones are recording randomly, with neither character able to stop it. That means the film can take place without the immersion breaking feeling of events being staged, unfortunately, it also means that visually, there is not much going on at all. Not even exaggerating, around 85% of the film takes place with audio only. This is interspersed with brief seconds long (sometimes milliseconds long) footage from the character's phones, and as the characters are not meaning to record, these images are random to say the least. You get flashes of trees, of legs, and feet, all intentionally not framed, to give a disorientating effect. It also means that there is a heck of a lot of nothing being shown on screen. To add to the confusing feeling, the footage when it does appear, is shown from a vertical view rather than horizontal, so you get letter boxed images. The horror is implied from these long parts of the movie where everything is black, as very occasionally (and admittedly effectively), you can just about make out strange things occurring in the blackness. Sometimes it seems the camera is travelling down some sort of burrow, or extremely close-up travelling towards a giant eyeball, and sometimes when there is footage on screen you get an almost subliminal snatch of what could possibly be some sort of being. These parts felt few and far between, I found myself pondering at times if the darkness on my PC monitor was too dark maybe, and that I should have been witnessing more than I did.
Outside of what is shown (or rather not shown), the plot of the film is carried by Golan and Maya, with this feeling at times much more an audio drama than a film proper. I think this could experienced purely from audio alone without too much really being lost. With Don't Look in the Dark not once showing the protagonists either fully, or their faces, it became increasingly hard to care about them in the slightest, not helped by never once getting a clear look at the characters you are meant to feel for. In fact, I found the couple's bickering to get more and more irritating. They are constantly arguing, either Golan complaining about his wife's wild goose chase and refusal to admit they are lost, or Maya complaining about her husband's obvious lies that he knows how to get back to their car. When they are not fighting, they take it in turns to either have panic attacks, or to fall to the ground and state they are too tired/injured to move. It became actually tiring - the lean 70 minute runtime felt like it was twice as long as it actually was. I found myself wishing I could crawl into the film and throttle them both!
I didn't enjoy my time with Don't Look in the Dark, but that isn't to say it is badly made in the slightest, or that it shouldn't be seen. It gets around the bugbear of why the characters are filming for one thing, and while to me it seemed like the flashes of footage were random and didn't add anything, of course they were on purpose, with the director intentionally showing and not showing exactly what they wanted to. This was also a found footage that felt very unique. If you love the genre but think that you have seen everything it has to offer, then it would be a disservice to not suggest giving this one a try. I may have been equal parts bored and frustrated with this, but there was also the occasional chill of fear with its adherence to making this feel like genuine unintentionally recorded found footage; the sometimes distorted audio and suggestions of something lurking almost unseen in the darkness. Experimental and divisive (unless I am the sole person who the film didn't resonate with!), this nonetheless achieved something very different. Don't Look in the Dark had its Jersey premiere on 31st January as part of the New Jersey Film Festival.
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