This Geek In Netflix: Left in Darkness
I almost find myself sorry to be confessing that I actually enjoyed this week’s movie. I’d gotten so used to the weekly helping of crap being served up that this little gem caught me off guard.
Don’t judge this movie by its cover.
Left in Darkness is a horror movie (yes, another one… I can’t help myself) released in 2006, staring the lovely Monica Keena.
Quick break! This is the same Monica Keena from Night of the Demons! YES! Okay, back to the review!
The male lead is played by Mr. David Anders, someone you might recognize from Heroes, Alias, The Vampire Diaries (no one over 15 watched that, I know), or 24. So he’s got a little bit of a TV resume.
The movie opens with old home-video footage of Celia (Monica Keena’s character) as a child, on a beach. The credits roll and a fairly gorgeous mood-setter of a song plays. I really dug the slight wobble of the camera and not-quite-centered shots that gave it that home-video feel, so props to them.
Gramps, we need to talk about your prostate.
We shift to an older Celia, probably 11 or so, sitting in a cemetery, talking to (what appears to be) no one. Her grandfather crouches to talk to her about her dead mother and she runs off in a fit. Unfortunately, this fit leads her to a busy street. Fortunately, she now has a Magic Ghost Friend to yank her a good five feet into the air like a little rag doll.
Flashforward to a 21 year old Celia, leaving her apartment with her best friend to go out for her birthday.
Personally, I think she should trade in for a new best friend, because her BFF’s idea of “birthday celebration” involved taking her to a frat party to get gang raped.
So her friend didn’t know about the gang rape part, but still… a frat party? Can’t we import a mail-order friend from Russia for poor Celia?
Back to the gang rape. Celia gets drugged (By the guy her BFF introduced to her! This girl fails!) and gang raped by the frat members, then dies from being overdosed with whatever date-rape drug they used.
This frat house was obviously not recruiting chemistry majors.
Most of us have had nights like this. Just admit it.
Apparently they decided to dump her body in the bathroom and go back to partying, as she wakes up with her jeans down and her feet hanging out of the shower.
Once she wakes, she freaks out about the rape then, when she sees her dead body, freaks out even more. And don’t pretend that you wouldn’t freak out in the same situation because you totally would. Have some empathy, jeez.
Eventually she makes her way out of the bathroom and into the rest of the house, where she encounters her (un)dead grandfather, who tells her to get out of the house and run like the dickens. (He didn’t actually say “dickens,” but he’s old, so I’m going to go for it.)
The results of an unchecked prostate.
So, stuff happens. Turns out that it isn’t her grandfather at all, but a “soul eater” that has consumed her grandfather’s soul and can thus assume his form and has access to all of his memories. She learns this from Donovan, a man who says he is the ghost who saved her from the rushing car nearly a decade before.
Donovan is there, at this point, as a rule-layer-outer (it’s a very technical term). He lets us, and Celia, know the functioning boundaries of the undead world while pushing Celia to take some actions she isn’t comfortable in taking. (No, not that. Sigh. She was just raped. Really? Don’t even pretend you didn’t go there, because I know you did.)
They run around, Celia gets other information from other (un)dead sources that aren’t necessarily trustworthy, and learns that she has approximately two hours of safety before the soul eaters can truly go after her.
As more information continues to present itself, things begin to unfold and Donovan begins to develop as a character with his own motivations in regards to Celia.
“My mom’s Nicole Richie? NOOOOOOOOOO!“
More things happen. The end. No, I’m not going to spoil it for you.
I’m going to get my two complaints out of the way before I start talking about how much I enjoyed this movie.
The Complaints
1. Non-violent scenes involving two characters in close physical proximity apparently inspire the director to weave about the characters like a drunken sailor with the permanent spins. It’s nausea-inducing, so much so that I had to pause the movie to let my stomach settle.
2. With the amount of “rules” brought forth by Donovan, not all of them were clearly followed or explained. I was a bit confused at one point and completely lost at another– and this isn’t common for me. The rules were so clearly laid out that I can only assume that there was dialogue that was cut from the movie explaining certain features.
Now for The Love:
1. I loved the aesthetics of the undead world. Celia was basically confined to the frat house where she died. However, it wasn’t quite the same. All the walls were now white, most of the furniture was gone, there were bits of trash and drywall about, giving it this feel of a rushed move and years of neglect. Whoever was running the art department did an amazing job in bringing this together.
The awkward Madonna music video insert.
2. Mirrors function as windows into the living world. It was visually wonderful to have Celia standing in this abandoned white-washed world looking into a colorful mirror packed with people. Also, Celia could touch the mirror and “enter” the living world as, what we would consider, a more traditional ghost (albeit invisible) with the ability to influence inanimate objects.
3. The sound effects were lovely. The house had the constant distant chatter of the frat party, giving it that eerie feel that you get in other horror movies except in reverse, as she was dead and hearing the living, while the characters are usually the living hearing the dead.
Jesus Christ, it’s a lion! Get in the car!
4. This was a puzzle movie, which I love. They feed bits of information to you as Celia goes along, slowly figuring it out as she does. At some points, yes, you know that certain characters are probably going to go a certain way, but you aren’t sure of the how or the whys, just the end result.
5. The acting was great. This movie wasn’t driven by thrills or sex, it was character-driven and, without the talents of the actors, it would have been a tremendous flop. Keena knows what she’s doing and has the most perfect eyes for a terrified horror movie lead.
It’s like they aren’t even attached to the upper lids.
6. It didn’t rely on the scare tactics to keep tension, like so many horror movies do. They maintained the constant pressure of the deadline (har de har har) so well that the monsters were more like a push for her to make a decision while providing a source of needed information than anything else.
Yes, the plot was a rehash of the generic “trials to save one’s soul,” but it was done in such a way that I was greatly annoyed at my need to take screen-shots and to write notes. I did not want to stop watching at any point, nor at any point did I get that sudden realization that I was watching a movie– you know, that feeling you get when something is poorly paced and you drop interest without realizing it.
This was a tumble down the rabbit hole sort of movie, an undead Alice with no hope of escaping Wonderland. I highly recommend it if you want something a bit different from your run of the mill monster-chaser. It is, as always, available on Netflix on Demand.
See you kids next week; same bat time, same bat channel.
