Describe This Movie In One "The Cave" Lyric:
MUMFORD & SONS: The harvest left no food for you to eatBrief Plot Synopsis: Prehistoric peril plagues plucky primitives.
You cannibal, you meat-eater, to see
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Films: 2.5 Fear of the Dark albums out of 5.
Tagline: "The dawn of man. The birth of fear."
Better Tagline: "Stop, children, what's that sound?"
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: 45,000 years ago, a boat crosses a narrow sea and deposits six people on a desolate land. Finding no arable land nearby, they set out across the wilderness for the shelter of distant caves, only to realize something(?) is stalking them in the night.
"Critical" Analysis: When you get right down to it, the "dawn of man" isn't a gold mine of cinematic opportunities. You can: fight CGI sabertooth tigers (10,000 BC), fight CGI lions and domesticate wolves (Alpha), fight each other and learn exciting new sexual positions (Quest for Fire), or just say 'the hell with it' and fight dinosaurs while wearing fuzzy bikinis (One Million Years B.C., Caveman).
What you don't often get is survival horror, maybe because the mere act of existing prior to the advent of hygiene, antibiotics, and Food Network was already pretty ghastly.
The darkness in the current title (the movie originally went by The Origin) could refer to the "demons" the venerable (by Pleistocene standards) Odal (Arno Luening) imagines are lurking in the shadows. Or it could be a metaphor for our own ignorance and dread. Whatever the case, a promising start ultimately fails to deliver.
Things have always been out there going "bump" in the night, so it's when we see that's actually picking our travelers off that Out of Darkness switches from (possibly) supernatural horror to survival thriller. It's also when our suspension of disbelief pivots from "Man, these Homo sapiens sure are well coiffed" to "Really? Those guys?"
Director Andrew Cumming and writer Ruth Greenburg at least imbue our Paleolithic hipsters with some nuance. Leader Adem (Chuku Modu) may be a formidable hunter, but he's also a bully, obsessive, and sexist even by Stone Age standards. It's that last quality that ends up putting the rest of the group in danger, as he blindly pursues his son Heron's (Luna Mwezi) abductors into Mirkwood (or whatever), abandoning his pregnant wife and female tagalong.
Circumstances lead to unlikely heroes stepping forward. "Unlikely," though not completely unforeseen, given earlier exposition. Young Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green) is a "stray," you see; not part of the original family unit and therefore more expendable. Until she isn't. Conflicts still arise over how best to face the peril, i.e. should they prepare for Odal's boogeyman theory, or resort to more practical means?
Needless to say, there's some generational difference of opinion, and the group's bonds, initially shared due to mutual trauma, begin to fray as the remnants of the group disagree on how to get the hell out of there.
Out of Darkness bears some similarities to Prey, another movie featuring quote-unquote "primitive" people confronting unknown antagonists, and both feature (ultimately) unlikely female leads. It's actually a bit of a surprise the low-key Darkness found a theatrical release over the bigger budget franchise IP film (although it does explain why Adem looks like he invented tweezers and the beard trimmer). Expectations probably weren't that high for a barely 90-minute movie in which no one speaks English (the characters speak "Tola," a language made up for the film), but it's found some early critical success.
But by the time we learn the monsters were us all along, it's far too late for the lesson to have much of an impact. Cumming's debut captures some of the dread Beyah and company feel (and kudos to DP Ben Fordesman for shooting nights scenes we can actually see), but Out of Darkness drags us through the woods too long for any proper payoff.
Out of Darkness is in theaters today.
