It's not very good, I'll grant that much, but had Darkness been one of those little films released quietly to DVD for people to discover on their own, it might have had a better shake at garnering some fans. But it's impossible to approach the movie without expecting it to be terrible, so that's how it goes down, forever limiting the cult of fandom to pervy older dudes who have been patiently observing Anna Paquin's, er, development since The Piano. (I'm only partially in that camp … I mean I will buy her eventual porno Paquin Heat, but it's not like I'm waiting with bated breath, especially since I downloaded some grainy spycam footage of Dakota Fanning being potty-trained, and so can spend my endless lustful hours enjoying a beautiful view of South Dakota, if you know what I mean.) While I really wanted Darkness to be an unfairly maligned horror gem, the best I can say is that it was just maligned for the wrong reasons. A promising story is sunk consistently by bad writing, questionable acting, and horror clichés piled so thick that I thought for awhile I may have been watching a compilation video. Ten minutes in, the haunted-eyed younger brother starts making "scary" drawings of things no one else can see … and it only gets worse from there. Elements—and sometimes full scenes—are nicked from The Sixth Sense, The Ring, The Others, The Grudge, The Shining, and countless others. Plus the more general horror clichés of flickering lights, power outages, shadowy figures in dark rooms, people who aren't what they seem to be, etc, etc, etc. Paquin tries her best, and sometimes pulls it off, playing the teenage daughter uprooted by her insane dad (Iain Glenn, whose Irish accent comes and goes) and bitchy mom (Lena Olin, who seems to have fused with Barbara Hershey) to go live in a haunted house in Spain. Paquin pretty good with the pouty "no one is listening to me!" stuff, though not so much with the "I'm absolutely terrified!" scream-queen stuff. But, for the pervs, she seems to go swimming quite a bit and takes a lot of baths. Despite the cliché-fest, Darkness consistently feels like it's about to get really scary, then it never does. The writing is often excruciating (Lena Olin's part consists entirely of refusing to listen to Anna Paquin, even when directly asked to), and the film ultimately makes the critical mistake of leaving its climax in the hands of several non-English-speaking actors, including Giancarlo Giannini, who's a great presence but a complete mushmouth—especially when trying to convincingly deliver dialogue written by Spaniards in English about "the occult." Hence, all hope of understanding what's happened is lost in a badly-recorded murk of swarthy Euronunciation. Perhaps I should have watched it with subtitles, but I just hate the deaf so much, I can't bear to ever do that.
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