Tags
Bailee Madison, Comic Book, Creatures, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark, Gothic, Grimm Fairy Tales, Guillermo Del Toro, Guy Pearce, Haunted House, Horror, Katie Holmes, Latchkey's Lament, Thriller, Troy Nixey
Here is an opulent and haunting horror-thriller. It revels in its shadows and the dark, richness of its colour palette, and it also has the courage of its convictions, taking the story into much darker and frightening terrain than was originally expected. It’s a hermetically sealed world of gothic fright.
Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce star as Kim and Alex, a couple in a relatively new relationship, and invested in restoring classically old manors to their originally glory. The wonderful young actress Bailee Madison plays the real lead of the film, Sally, who’s sent to live with here father (Pearce) from her off screen, and obviously unfit, mother in L.A. Within hours of arriving, Sally begins to suspect that there is something else living within the house. Something that is whispering to her through the vents to come and play with them. From here, the story hooks are in, and we’re off into the dark land of fairytales once more, overseen by old reliable, Guillermo Del Toro.
Del Toro knows fairytales better than anyone working in film today. He’s able to mine so many dark tales that have circulated the public consciousness for hundreds of years and weave them subtly into a Grimm tale that never feels overstuffed. It’s also a story that never overstays its welcome. I’ve often bemoaned the fact that it’s no longer acceptable for a film to play out at 65-70 minutes in length and have the story still leave the viewer feeling satiated. The business of film has shackled the unconsciousness of storytelling to think that they must tell their tale in 95-120 minutes in length, regardless of whether the story will support that divide. Now, this isn’t to say that “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” is that short (it actually plays out at 99 minutes, including credits), but the point is that it’s the right length. There’s no fat on this story, there are no extraneous scenes. It might be with the assist of Matthew Robbins (writer-director of the unjustly overlooked “Dragonslayer”, “The Sugarland Express”, “Mimic” and uncredited writer on “Close Encounters”), but from a pure story perspective, this feels like Del Toro’s most solid writing effort.
The original “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” was a telefilm from 1973 starring Kim Darby. In those days, and up until the early 80s, the telefilm was a remarkably fertile storytelling field, where a lot of potent ghost stories and haunted house tales were told (my personal favourite being “Don’t Go To Sleep” from 1982) and future star directors began (Steven Spielberg’s “Duel” from 1971). The original film was just as disturbing as this take, but the visual exploration of the manor wasn’t as mesmerizing, and the cast not nearly as engaging. Del Toro has said that he often talked with his friends about the original film and they would ‘remember’ scenes from the that film which, in retrospect, seeing it again on TV, weren’t actually in the original film. That’s the power the original concept had on him and on viewers in general. Del Toro took that inspiration, and those new original scenes of his, and did a rewrite that at once pays homage to, but forges its own path. A lot of the fairytale relentlessness of this new version is wholly a creation of Del Toro and Robbins.
Troy Nixey is a relatively unknown talent, from my hometown of Lethbridge, Alberta. He started out as a comic book artist, having worked with Mike Mignola, Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner, before spending 5 years working on a short film called “Latchkey’s Lament“. Looking at his work in both you can easily draw parallels to what he does with the visuals here. He’s not afraid of the dark (if you will), and I’ve always wished that more filmmakers wouldn’t be as well. Present day films are often well overexposed (a product of brutal post production “correcting”), and with little attention to the grayscale midtones. Nixey has a lot of respect for the presence of light, and uses everything in between to tell this tale. In the films opening 20 minutes or so, particularly in a sequence where Sally wanders through the manor’s property, the visuals seemed so much like Del Toro’s previous work (with cotton/snow weightlessly dancing through the air) that I was wondering if we were in for another bit of movie trivia a la “Poltergeist”, as in did the director really direct this film. But shortly thereafter, Nixey’s visuals really took hold. His command and movement of the camera is much different to Del Toro’s, and I may venture to say that his eye for photo real integration of CGI effects is better than Del Toro’s, but that’s just personal opinion. As well, for once in a long while, this film has created menacing, interesting, well-designed original creatures, with a lot of personality. I’ve seen a lot of preproduction concept art for creatures in films, and something always seems to get lost in translation to the screen. Not true here.
It must be said that this film wouldn’t be as effective without the spot on casting, particularly with Bailee Madison and Katie Holmes. Madison is an absolute natural. There are many, many sequences in the film where she has to hold the screen on her own, often in tight close-up, and she does it without calling attention to herself. She reminds us, once again, at how flat and uninteresting most young actors are on the screen, but between this film and “Super 8″, it’s been a special summer, indeed. Katie Holmes is an actress I’ve had to defend in conversation on numerous occasions. To me, she was never trying to be a movie star, just a fine actress. She’s not aiming for an Oscar, she’s not playing to the cheap seats. Some think she has a limited range, but I see it as subtlety, a quality that most actors outright reject. How she’s able to sit and allow Sally to trust her, honestly, is a sweet and quiet transaction, which pays off in spades towards the climax. Holmes’ Kim is a character that isn’t allowed to speak her mind, or press any parental ideology because she’s just the girlfriend. She hasn’t a leg to stand on. Holmes has a scene where she finds Sally sitting in a tree out front after a horrific encounter, and the way Holmes doesn’t push the scene, and doesn’t take her eyes off Sally, is a surprisingly touching moment. You sense, without talk of back story, that Kim relates more to Sally than she could ever say. I look forward to each film that Holmes does, she seems to have impeccable taste, in script and director. I hope she continues into her career, unabated.
Fairy tales are often the darkest of stories. They’re unrelenting in their intent, they set the rules and often tell you from the offset how they’re going to end, regardless of what anyone does to prevent it. That inevitability is what makes them so haunting and disturbing. It’s not so much about violence or cruelty, it’s being trapped in the confines of a tale that you have absolutely no recourse to deter.
“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” closes the screws on its characters with relentless abandon.
