Film: The Darkness (Las Tienieblas), a spooky atmospheric thriller

Las Tenieblas (The Darkness)
Directed by Daniel Castro Zimbrón

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is presenting a horror film festival this summer, not what one usually expects at this bastion of esoteric art films. But these are not the typical US slasher movies—each exhibits a strong director’s presence and artful visuals. I saw a very interesting example, The Darkness by Mexican-born director Daniel Castro Zimbrón. The plot, quite confusing and mysterious, centers on a family of a violent, rustic woodsman with his three children living in a cabin in a very spooky foggy forest. He locks them in the basement each night, creating a steady subliminal suspicion of some sort of child abuse, but this incarceration is actually protective, as the cabin is irregularly visited by some sort of unseen earthquake-evoking monster presence, wonderfully evoked by the sounds of the movie. There is much chopping up of hunted animals, creepy puppet manufacture, and nighttime fright sounds. The woodsman mysteriously dons a facemask when hunting—are the woods burning? Is this some sort of radioactive post-apocalyptic landscape? Is it a ruse by the father to frighten the children? Nothing is explained, and throughout the movie one can entertain both a psychological/delusional explanation and an actual monster-centered one, each with some defense. This uncertainty is not at all the norm for US monster movies, but very much fits the ambiguous psychological style of many recent horror and sci-fi movies (e.g. The Blair Witch Project 1999), many influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker.

The other striking aspect of The Darkness was its gorgeous cinematography. Much of the movie occurs in the darkened cabin, and rather than just making it dark, Zimbrón chooses Caravaggio-like lamplit effects (see below) to cast a warm glow on the children’s faces, creating a nice tension between the spooky darkness and the radiant children’s faces.

He enhances this effect by choosing two very angelic looking kids as the younger actors (the older adolescent vanishes early in the movie for mysterious reasons). The eerie forest landscape was simultaneously frightening, mysterious, and beautiful, and reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic The Road (both the novel and the movie are excellent). Overall, the director combines many of our primal fears (the unknown, imprisonment, the woods, the creepy woodsman, puppets) in a very effective way. When combined with the excellent sound design (e.g. each padlock and doorlock sound menacing as they clink shut) and cinematography, The Darkness adds up to a deliberately paced, relentless psychological thriller worth seeing.