The Darkness

The Darkness follows the Taylor family – Kevin Bacon’s Peter, Radha Mitchell’s Bronny, Lucy Fry’s Stephanie, and David Mazouz’s Michael – as they return home from a Grand Canyon vacation and are eventually besieged by mysterious forces, with the rote, by-the-numbers narrative detailing the characters’ increasingly desperate efforts at discerning just what’s happening to them. The eventual transformation of The Darkness into a tedious genre exercise is particularly disappointing given its strong opening, as filmmaker Greg McLean, working from a script cowritten with Shayne Armstrong and Shane Krause, kicks things off with a striking (and ominous) pre-credits sequence that seemingly sets the stage for a solid horror flick. From there, however, The Darkness segues into a slow-moving midsection that does, for the most part, play like a carbon-copy of other, better movies – with the periodic inclusion of effective elements (eg Peter and Bronny first chalk Michael’s weird behavior up to his Autism) ultimately unable to compensate for a paint-by-numbers storyline. (It’s clear, too, that the tiresome emphasis on the protagonists’ domestic problems compounds the less-than-engrossing vibe, with, for example, Bronny considering a return to alcohol and Stephanie dealing with a pretty substantial case of bulimia.) The narrative builds to a loud and over-the-top finale that just doesn’t work and is as anticlimactic as one might’ve feared, with The Darkness, in the end, unable to establish a place for itself within an exceedingly crowded marketplace packed with movies of a similar ilk.

*1/2 out of ****