A teenage girl and her family move into a house with a malevolent past. Decades ago, an evil cult murdered a group of children during a solar eclipse in an attempt to release the forces of darkness. Now, another eclipse is on the way, and restless spirits begin to stir within the house.

Just a short note, this review is based on the unrated DVD edition.

‘Darkness’ is a frustrating film. It comes within a hair’s reach of being creepy, but it’s not. It’s a shame, as it’s pretty well made and very imaginative, but it’s just not scary in the least. You spend most of the film thinking “Oh, it’s getting good now, I can feel that this film is about to get really horrifying.” but the build up never leads to anything.

Warning. Minor spoilers are ahead, but those things that are revealed here, become apparent early on in the film.

There are some obvious flaws in the film which create this problem. First, the writing really needed some polish. The plot is a little too transparent, the father’s flashbacks, the ritual paraphernalia, the house’s history, it’s all way too obvious. The final revelation concerning the villain is comes as absolutely no surprise. The occult influence itself is handled a bit sloppily. There’s no real purpose to the cult’s activities, other than some vague mumblings about releasing darkness. 
 Despite what lazy screenwriters may think, people don’t decide to become obsessed homicidal religious fanatics just out of boredom or curiosity. You don’t talk a dozen level-headed people into committing ritual child-murder with fuzzy promises and no apparent goal. (You need something rational and concrete, y'know, like promising them 72 virgins.)

Like so many films which rely on “suspense”, a lot of the scenes in ‘Darkness’ are simply redundant. There are many long, talky hunks of film here that simply serve to cover the same expository ground, reveal things we already guessed, and develop characters that were either already well understood, or which remain sketchy still.

Which brings us to the performances. The acting is adequate per se, but the ensemble of actors never gel together to create any type of family dynamic. You don’t have a hard time buying these actors as the people they are portraying, but they never seem related to each other in any way. Scenes which should possess emotional resonance are completely cold, and the whole movie just rings hollow and artificial.

The scary effects never really work. The film has too little supernatural activity in it, yet curiously, that which is there lacks all subtlety whatsoever. Ghostly children loiter en masse in hallways, twisted figures crawl across the ceiling in broad daylight, you wait forever for anything to happen, but when it finally does, it’s so blatantly phony as to inspire giggles instead of shrieks. It doesn’t help matters that the film also has an unfortunate tendency to telegraph exactly when something chilling is about to slither up. Some parts, the most low key (like a framed portrait of a group of apparently eyeless people) are very disturbing, and the penultimate scene of the film (a very Silent Hill-ish jaunt through the now darkness-possessed house) work very well. But on whole, the film never comes together.

It really does pain me to pan a film like this. It quirky, and a lot of hard work went into it, but it just doesn’t return the investment. In the end, ’Darkness’ is completely forgettable.