The Charlize Theron-starring mystery thriller Dark Places finally opening in theaters marks the end of a long, strange
journey. Based on the novel by author Gillian Flynn, the film has been in the
can for a while now—principal photography wrapped in 2013—and with the hype
surrounding Gone Girl last year, also adapted from a Flynn
novel, it would have made sense to release it then to capitalize on the
attention. Instead, it languished on the shelf, hitting theaters in France in
April, and was actually available to DirecTV customers back in June.
There is quite a bit to Dark Places that
appears very marketable, at least on the surface. Flynn is popular and in high
demand right now, the story shares a similar twisty thriller style as
Gone Girl, and director Gilles Paquet-Brenner put together a
fantastic cast, which includes Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Corey
Stoll, Christina Hendricks, and Chloe Grace Moretz. Watching the movie,
however, it becomes clear that, despite all of this possible upside, these
elements never come together in any meaningful way. There’s potential here, and
while it goes through the motions, that’s all it ever does.
Libby Day’s (Theron) entire family was murdered when she was
six years old. Supposedly her brother, Ben (Sheridan as a youth, Stoll as a
grown up), did the deed, she testified against him, and he has been in jail for
the crime for 28 years. Since then she’s survived on donations from strangers
who wanted to help a little girl and, as she says in awkwardly placed
voiceover, she’s never had to do anything. But the cash reserves running dry,
when a group of true crime enthusiasts called The Kill Club, led by Lyle Wirth
(Hoult), come to her pointing out holes in the case against Ben, she takes their
money and investigates the massacre, digging deeper and deeper into her past as
she goes.
The narrative is split into two timeframes, one which tracks
present day Libby as she follows leads and looks for clues, while the other
depicts the events from her childhood, building up to “that night.” Set up as
it is, Dark Places resembles the case of the West Memphis
Three, where a trio of teenage boys were wrongfully convicted of murdering
three children, largely because they were into heavy metal and there were
rumors of Devil worship.
Ben is a character who could have stepped out of one of
those Satanic Panic videos from the 1980s that seem so quaint now—remember when
people were convinced Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were leading the youth of America
into the waiting arms of the Devil? He dyes his hair black, has Misfits posters
on his walls, and pretends to be evil even though he volunteers in an after
school arts program. Basically, everything about him is shorthand for weird kid
in a small town.
Libby is supposed to be scuffed up and bruised and broken,
and while her surroundings fit this—she lives in a dumpy apartment, drives a
beater car, and is a borderline hoarder—looking at her, you never see anything
but Charlize Theron. With her perfect hair and nails and teeth, if all you do
is slap a worn trucker hat on top of that, she still exudes the glamor of a
major movie star. And aside from a personality quirk where she doesn’t like to
be touched (who wants to be fondled by strangers?), there’s little
characterization besides this horrific thing in her past that is supposed to
explain everything. It’s like the film says, “oh, she went through a trauma,
she’s messed up,” and that’s all.
Like Ben, Dark Places borders on
caricature of a the tense thriller. The pace plods along for almost two hours
as Libby finds one clue after another that leads her to the next plot point,
and it’s easy to spot where it’s headed from a long way off. There’s little
parallel between the two story threads, and everything the film does is almost
like a spoof. When Ben and his “satanic” friends, including his girlfriend
Diondra (Moretz), kill a cow, it’s more comical than evil, and at the moments
where the film is supposed to be the most serious and harrowing, it’s often
difficult not to laugh at how ridiculous the scenarios are. At one point an
uppity white woman screams at Libby’s mother (Hendricks) about how they’re poor
and that means her whole family is bad and terrible, and that’s as deep as
Dark Places ever goes.
With Gone Girl, David Fincher was able to
take a similar neo-noir narrative and give it a slick, stylistic work up. That
film leads you one way, only to shift perspective and subvert your
expectations—just when something seems concrete, it pulls the rug out.
Dark Places, however, simply meanders along in one very
obvious direction, and while the mechanics are fine, visually it’s flat, has
little to no flair to distinguish it, and feels like watching an episodic police
procedural on TV.
Dark Places is just pessimistic to its
core. Everyone is a liar, there are few redeeming qualities to be found, and
none of this dysfunction is even particularly interesting to watch. Character
motivations remain up in the air throughout—when it is revealed why one or
another behaves as they do, the natural response is often a perplexed,
“Really?” The plot machinations are apparent early on—Lyle and his cronies
exist to set things in motion then they largely disappear except when
convenient—and the result is a very paint-by-numbers whodunit. People love
Gone Girl, and while that may be an unfair comparison, this
feels more like a story from a writer still learning her craft.
[Grade: C-]
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