• Written and directed by Ray Gower
• Starring
  • Thora Birch
  • Tobe Stephens
  • Christien Anholt
  • Joanna Hole
  • Lorraine Bruce

I assume we’ve all seen horror movies in which the protagonist becomes unable to tell what’s physical reality and what’s a dream/hallucination/apparition/lazy screenplay. It’s a story element that makes it so easy to add supernatural dread whenever the plot flags that it’s become a lamentable cliche. There are only a few movies in which confusion over reality and unreality actually work, and those movies invariably center around the trustworthiness of the protagonist’s worldview as a theme and plot point. (I would cite Jacob’s Ladder and the original Carnival of Souls as the best examples, but you’d leap to unwarranted conclusions about the movie under discussion, so I won’t cite them.)

“You forgot the safety word already??”

Dark Corners is… infuriating. To a large degree, it’s the “good” kind of frustration; viewers like me usually try to get ahead of the plot and predict how the mysterious goings-on will resolve themselves, and this movie doesn’t allow you to do that. Unfortunately, the plot plays coy only too well, and refuses to submit to audience comprehension even once the closing credits start rolling. What payoff there is is grossly incomplete, and leaves watchers feeling like they’ve been sent away with homework.

Thora Birch of American Beauty (1999), all grown up now, plays Susan, spritely blonde twentysomething who, with her husband David (Christien Anholt), is living almost the perfect yuppie dream. She and David are successful white-collar types — no mention of what fields they work in, but they’re paid enough for a spacious house on gated, well-kept grounds. The only problem in their radiant, spotless life is a lack of fertility; despite three years of trying, Susan can’t conceive, and is about to go in for some test-tube babying to fulfill their family ambitions.

But Birch is also Karen, black-haired and single, who is Susan’s alter-ego in a phantasmagorical dream world. Karen’s world is one of unrelenting grime and decay. She lives alone, but wakes up with mysterious bloody bruises on her face. Her job is with a cut-rate mortician (Ray Charleson) whose antique pretensions don’t compensate for the shoddy cosmetic job he does preparing the dead for their last presentation. Any two points in Karen’s world are connected either by detritus-filled alleys or derelict industrial areas. And when Karen falls asleep… she dreams of Susan.

She’s saving up for a big-ass bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

I don’t think that anyone watching can seriously wonder for long whether Susan’s or Karen’s reality is the “real” one. Susan’s world is believable (at least within the world of Hollywood imagery). Karen’s is stylized like a torture-porn set where no one has heard of Mercurochrome or Windex. Susan finds her nightmares extremely disturbing; Karen only finds them an unsettling distraction. They don’t seem like flipsides of the same person; they’re more like radically different individuals, linked only by an actress in common.

But there are some niggling little parallels between their worlds. Their televisions both show the same newscaster, who almost gleefully keeps the city updated on the actions of the “nightstalker,” a knife-wielding serial killer who eviscerates and dismembers his (invariably female) victims. Both have fleeting encounters with the nightstalker (during daylight – does this mean we need to change his name?), who attacks their friends. And when Susan finds out that the implantation took and she’s pregnant with three viable embryos, Karen discovers too that she’s pregnant… by the nightstalker, whom she videotapes creeping from under her bed at night, beating and raping her while she’s strangely senseless.

“I’ve got to stop taking shortcuts through these post-apocalyptic neighborhoods.”

Writer-director Ray Gower seems to have burst onto the scene by parthenogenesis, with no previous credits that rise to the level noticed by the IMDb. However he was trained, under his direction the cinematography is confident and compelling. (Somewhat less so the editing, which shows an annoying inability or disregard for matching performer expressions and stances between cuts.) The script is likewise confident, with most dialog outside of a few colorful characters being believably low-key and not overly labored.

Performances are also good. Birch and Anholt do a good job of portraying a well-adjusted young married couple. (Special commendation for the treatment of David, Susan’s husband; as a supporting character in a storyline which is really one-half of the narrative we see, it would have been easy to turn him into a swaggering over-male cliché to maximize the effect of his time on screen. Instead, he’s shown as reasonable, understandably protective of his sweetheart, but not afflicted with Male Answer Syndrome or any of the other hackneyed behaviors of husband characters in supernatural horror movies.) Birch also shows admirable restraint in her differentiation of the two roles she plays; while Karen is far more taciturn than Susan, Birch seems content to let the costuming and backdrops do the heavy lifting instead of seeing the movie as some sort of thespian challenge requiring her to show incredible range or something.

Most psychoanalysts would just have a candybowl on their desks, but no…

And yet, and yet… there’s an implied promise to the audience any time a movie presents a mystery, and that is simply that the mystery will resolve itself. It need not be a “twist” ending or even a happy one; there simply needs to be some kind of resolution to the story. This one ends with a scene which, I think, is supposed to be something of a twist, the kind that forces us to reevaluate the preceding ninety minutes in its light… but even when doing so, the ending makes little sense. (Yes, I’m deliberately trying to remain spoiler-free, a heavy feat when one’s criticisms of a movie center around the conclusion. On the other hand, even to explain to you what the final scene IS and why it’s significant, I’d have to expand greatly my plot recap.) I’ve puzzled as far as I can, but to my view there is no way to make sense of the ending without discarding roughly half of the movie. In other words, I think that the ending was conceived after Gower fell in love with the earlier parts of his narrative, and he was unwilling to throw out parts that he thought were cool up ultimately either irrelevant or distracting. In screenwriter parlance, he was unwilling to “kill his babies” – certainly an ironic charge, given some of the material on display here.

(A semi-related but spoiler-free complaint: It seems not me not only unfair but obviously so to frame a movie such as this within the viewpoints of two specific characters, especially when so much of the story concerns said characters’ subjective and possibly unreliable perceptions, and then throw in a few scenes outside of those characters’ knowledge just to move the plot along. You picks yer viewpoints and you sticks to ‘em.)

I’m a little tired tonight, kids; make up your own funny caption here.

It’s quite possible that repeated viewings would help me puzzle out the pieces needed to assemble a coherent whole; I know that at least two innocuous scenes near the beginning hold details which would be almost wholly forgotten by the time their import is revealed at the end, and there may well be others I missed entirely. But I refuse to do that. I will gladly rewatch movies which were satisfying to me on first viewing and discover greater craft and attention to narrative detail on subsequent viewings, but I won’t watch an unsatisfying movie again even if I’m guaranteed that a second viewing will clear it all up for me. A movie should be a satisfying and coherent whole on a its first viewing, even if there is more to discover; a movie which relies on repeated viewings to give the audience the satisfaction they deserve the first time through has overstepped the bounds of the filmmaker/audience relationship, and quite likely still can’t give what’s promised even if the audience goes that extra mile.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 2
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: at least 12
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• moments that will leave men wincing: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Doctor Who: 5 (shot in London, though you can’t tell)