A Dark Song
2016 ‧ Drama film/Horror ‧ 1h 40m
A young woman and a damaged occultist risk their souls to perform a ritual.
PLOT: A woman hoping to connect with her dead son locks herself in a house with a potentially disturbed expert on the occult.
A Dark Song was intense as all Hell.
Structured around a grueling ritual, a clearly damaged woman named Sophia (Catherine Walker), who we can gather is suffering a great loss. She arranges to pick up a man named Solomon (Steve Oram), a testy, conceited jerk who she invites to her just-purchased mansion, located far from any recognizable civilization. For a while the movie is tantalizingly oblique in its purpose.
A Dark Song follows two strangers as they spend six months locked up alone in a remote house, testing the limits of their physical and mental breaking points to conjure a guardian angel who will grant them each an impossible wish. Catherine Walker stars as Sophia, a woman drowning in her grief over the death of her young son. In over her head, but willing to do whatever it takes to see him once again, Sophia recruits Joseph Solomon (Sightseers‘ Steve Oram), an experienced practitioner of the dark arts, and an aggressive man who wields his superior knowledge with contempt.
Gavin, who also penned the script, makes two very important things clear from the beginning: The magic at work is brutal and extraordinarily dangerous — it’s not quite dark magic, but it’s the kind of spell that could cost you your soul if you do it wrong. And neither of them can be trusted.
Gavin keeps us guessing until the closing scenes. Even after the house begins to creak and slither with eerie apparitions, he drops teasing hints that the whole experiment could be a scam by Joseph, or even a hallucinatory vision inside Sophia’s unstable mind. When the nightmarish denouement eventually arrives, it feels less satisfying than the prickly human drama which preceded it. This is largely due to financial factors, as Gavin plainly lacks the visual effects budget to bring this hellish tableau vividly to life. But an agreeably audacious final twist comes out of the blue, elevating A Dark Song from pagan psycho-thriller to quasi-Biblical parable.
Release date: April 28, 2017 (USA)
Director: Liam Gavin
Screenplay: Liam Gavin
