Tony sees red.
There are movies that
wear their influences subtly, almost behind their hands, fluttering
fans of exposition or action at you every now and again to disguise
where they’re coming from.
Then there are movies
that more or less revel in their influences and put them right up
there on the screen for you to notice as you go through.
The Dark Red is
the second type of movie, a horror thriller with bits of Rosemary’s
Baby, bits – or so it seems – of I Spit On Your Grave,
and even, though I’m sure that’s less intentional, bits of
Torchwood, Children Of Earth about it, with liberal helpings
of The Sixth Sense, a scoop of The Da Vinci Code, a
handful of Scanners and even a touch of Glass about it.
It absolutely shouldn’t work, this blend of ingredients – it
should be a ghastly, ungovernable mess.
It’s not a ghastly,
ungovernable mess.
It’s not, at any
stage, particularly fun, but then it’s not really supposed
to be – it’s supposed to pull you in and involve you in the story
of a woman with a past, a mystery, and maybe, if she’s
exceptionally lucky, even a future. And that, it does really well,
threatening at almost every stage of the game to flip the script on
you, and actually pulling that flip once or twice, usually just at
the moment when you think you’ve figured out what’s really going
on.
Sybil Warren (April
Billingsley) is a troubled woman. Traumatised as a child, she
seemingly suffers from sensory delusions – after a scene that shows
us at least something of her early trauma, we’re introduced to her
as mostly a mouth in a psych ward, being interviewed by Dr Deluce
(Kelsey Scott), the gatekeeper of her freedom. And so unfolds a
nerve-jangling story of a woman who fell in love, who got pregnant
with the man of her dreams (played like a sweater-wearing Nathan
Fillion by co-writer Conal Byrne), and who ultimately went home to
meet her would-be in-laws.
If nothing else, this
movie will make you scared to go home to meet your prospective
in-laws. There are facades, layers, lies, an unsual dinner, and Sybil
wakes up from a sleep…no longer pregnant.
The reasons she wakes
up no longer pregnant would be spoilerific, as would the reasons
behind the reasons, but the question thrums throughout this movie –
what the hell is real, and what is not? Because Sybil has a history
of schizophrenia and delusions, you treat everything in the movie on
at least two levels even as you watch it the first time – are the
people on screen now real, or imagined? Did events happen the way
Sybil describes them, or did she imagine them for some reason or
other? This question of what’s real and what isn’t stops you ever
relaxing during this movie – you’re never absolutely sure, even
at the end, that what you’ve witnessed is the product of a reliable
narrator, because the story she tells (and ultimately shows us) is
bat-crap crazy. It’s every conspiracy theory you could imagine (a
la Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen), for the sake of a
bloodline of unusual power (The Da Vinci Code), positively
brimming with class condescension – one particularly loathsome rich
man tells Sybil at one point that she’s nothing but an animal for
breeding, and you could actually read the whole movie as a metaphor
for the 1% leeching off the poor if you decided to activate your
social conscience while watching a horror thriller. The movie follows
Sybil on a quest not only to establish what the hell is really going
on, but once she’s reasonably confident about it, to get her Sarah
Connor on, train, plan, fight and ultimately kill her way to a
confrontation with those who she maintains took her baby from her.
There are real battles and symbolic ones, assassinations,
discreditings, you name it – the powers she faces, if we accept her
explanation, are controlling every lever and every level of society,
with a very particular interest at heart. The ongoing uncertainty
about which elements of what we’re seeing in any way correspond to
an agreed-upon reality makes the action interesting and throws us
off-kilter as Sybil plans to take her revenge and ideally, find a
kind of liberation from the clutches of this all-powerful cabal of
rich evil monsters.
Billingsley deserves
some serious props here for keeping the movie on a knife-edge when it
could easily have fallen into schlock territory. Dan Bush, as
writer-director too, is to be congratulated for never allowing the
movie to fall into quite the territory of some movies with which this
shares a bloodline, like Scanners and I Spit On Your Grave.
Yes, there are unusual mental powers involved, and yes, something
horrible is done to a defenceless young woman who then kills her way
to retribution and redress, but there’s always that pulse of
uncertainty over the truth of things that keeps you watching here,
rather than ever daring to believe you know what’s what and losing
interest in a tale already told.
Is The Dark Red
an eternal classic of horror cinema? Probably not – it’s a little
too sane for that on some levels. While there’s gore and stabbing
and people being shot in the leg and the head and locked inside
imaginary cupboards of darkness (we mentioned the part where you’re
never entirely sure what’s real, right?), it’s a movie that
prefers for the most part to drive your nerves like a violin-bow back
and forth over a razor-blade for an hour and a half, giving you
effectively telegraphed moments of deeply unnerving action, rather
than jump-scares. In other words, while it might not rank among the
eternal classics, it’s a movie that will deeply disturb you
throughout the entirety of its run-time and then stay in your head
for hours afterwards, prodding at you, making you wonder about the
nature of reality, and whether in fact, there might be cabals
of evil, corrupted human beings running the world for their own ends.
While the Romantic in your soul might call that a lazy assumption,
the pragmatist in your brain has to admit it would explain a whole
hell of a lot.
The Dark Red is
a symphony of disturbing influences and beats, held together by a
plot that ballet-steps over the line from one reality to another and
back a handful of times during the course of ninety minutes or so.
It’s realistically played by all its cast, despite delving into
murky psychological waters and potentially unreal realities, and the
fact that everybody plays it deadpan helps to heighten the unnerving
realism of these mad, unlikely plot elements, and turn them into
something, like Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray
Bradbury, that’s upsetting and wince-making and disturbing all at
once, but from which you’ll also find it impossible at any point to
pull away.<
Give it a go – but
don’t blame us if it keeps you up at night.
Tony lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly
nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who,
Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the
70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By
day, he
runs an editing house, largely as an
excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book.
With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk
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