Adèle and her daughter Sarah goes to Wales to visit her ex-husband James. While out by the sea one day, Sarah disappears and appears to have drowned. Later, a young girl named Ebrill who apparently died over 60 years ago comes and visit Adèle and James. Adèle starts investigating and her search leads her to Welsh mythology, about crossing over to the other side to bring persons back to the side of the living. Can Adèle somehow use this legend to bring her daughter back from the dead?
Apparently The Dark is based on a novel called "Sheep", but I haven't actually read that novel and I'm not planning to do so either. Personally, for a while this movie looked like a complete The Ring rip-off (that is a movie ripping off the remake). In The Ring, horses started to die mysteriously and acted funny because of a little girl. Well, you have exactly that here too, only thing here is that it deals with sheep instead of horses. But that's just one part of it all. Another part is like something out of a Stephen King novel, the dead are brought back to life but does not always come back as wanted.
I can't believe that this movie came from the same man that gave us Ginger Snaps. While Ginger Snaps was somewhat original and creative, The Dark is just another "horror" movie that seems to be under heavy influence of some greater horror flicks out there. It really has nothing new to offer, and while it had a lot of potential to be scary at times, it failed miserably at doing so. It has a number of scares but they are all quite cheap, and at certain moment we actually get to sit through some short suspense scene before it's interupted with some lame thing that leads to nothing.
So mother Adèle (Maria Bello) goes to Wales with her daughter Sarah (Sophie Stuckey) to visit the kids father James (Sean Bean). On the way they get their car stuck in the mud close to a cliff, and Adèle gets a premonition/dreams some weird dream of her daughter falling off the cliff. So there we go, we get to know exactly what's gonna happen but first we have to sit through a lot of nonsense before the daughter actually meets her maker. That part completely bored me out, it's bad enough to know what's gonna happen so I was thinking maybe there's some clever twist to it but no, no twist whatsoever.
With the daughter gone, both James and Adèle are left devastated. James keeps helping the police search the waters while Adèle discovers some Welsh mythology about how to bring back the dead by sacrificing one of the living. She reads old newspaper articles about how some sheep went crazy and started dying all over the place, and The Ring influence here is enormous. First off you have the sheep to replace the horses, you have a female lead investigating and searching old newspaper articles in a library to find out what happened in a certain place many years ago, plus that you have an evil little girl causing the sheep (that's horses in The Ring) to die. Now, if they haven't ripped everything off, it's an amazing coincidence to say the least. Oh, did I mention that the mom goes to a mysterious place to look for her lost daughter...hello Silent Hill.
This is a typical thriller that adds in some horror elements once in a while but that does not work too good. At times it felt that some scenes had a lot of potential of being quite scary, but they managed to ruin that completely. Just like in the movie Half Light, we get some beautiful scenery but it didn't save that movie and it does not save this movie either. The acting is kinda decent, Maria Bello is pretty good as the mom, Sean Bean is neither good nor bad, he's just there, but the daughter, Sophie Stuckey, sure has no clue of how to act. I know that she's a kid and I don't wanna rack down on kids but she's absolutely terrible. Everything feels so fake around her and her character is not belivable at all. Sorry kid, better luck next time.
Any real horror or anything close to that is nowhere to be found. It's first and most a thriller but that has a lame story with nothing original to it. The actual ending seemed to be able to turn out pretty decent for a while, but just like with the scares, they couldn't seem to get that right either. For people into lame braindead thriller this might just hit the spot, but horror fans are recommened to stay away from this mess.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: John Fawcett
WRITING CREDITS: Simon Maginn, Stephen Massicotte
GENRE: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
CAST: Sean Bean, Maria Bello, Sophie Stuckey
COUNTRY: Germany, UK
RUNTIME: 93 min
RATING: 2/10
Dark, The Website/IMDB Click here
Dark, The Trailer Click here
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