"The Dark" reminds me of "Silent Hill" in a lot of ways (which is probably why they are packaged together sometimes). It involves a missing child and alternate realities – another dimension, if you will, that is like the spirit world but not like most portrayals of it.

 

Sarah comes to visit her dad, James, in the Welsh countryside. A strange little religion once existed here, one that ended in a mass suicide in the waters below a steep cliff. Sarah vanishes by this same water. Thinking she has fallen into the water but hoping she has managed not to drown her parents search frantically for her. Adelle, her mother, comes to believe Sarah is in the Welsh version of the afterlife, Annwn (pronounced like ah-noon in the movie), and is trying to communicate with them from the other side looking for a way to get back.

 

The Welsh believe (in the movie at least, I have no idea if this is accurate) that souls can cross back and forth between life and death under certain circumstances. A strange girl shows up about this same time, one with links to the past that don't seem possible. Is she a ghostly villain or a victim of some horror? Either way she is the only possible key to getting Sarah back as James and Adelle try to uncover the old mystery of the shepherd and his daughter.

 

The first big problem with the story is that character relationships are not firmly established. Sometimes I get the impression that James and his wife are estranged but maybe thinking about trying to work it out, sometimes I feel they're OK and have just grown apart some (though they obviously keep different houses at this point but that could potentially have other explanations than a divorce). Other times I get the idea that they are definitely divorced and just trying to make the best of their now separate lives for the sake of Sarah.

 

Sometimes Sarah's mother seems like she just doesn't have her act completely together and sometimes she seems borderline abusive. The problem is that she is inconsistent. She seems too much like a caring, doting mother too quickly after fighting with Sarah. I guess she is supposed to be a bad mother trying to improve, but she doesn't seem like she's acting out of guilt or remorse. Some voicing of her thoughts of her current relationship with Sarah might have been beneficial to illustrating her mindset.

 

The point of Adelle’s bad mothering is predominately geared towards creating tension between her and Sarah. The tension has important implications towards interpreting the end of the story, and the interactions between the caring mother and the disgusted child are reasonably well done. The problem is really with jumping from one point in a character’s thinking to another point without feeling like there’s a natural link between them. If you can get past that and just accept the scenes at face value maybe that won't be a bother.

 

The nature of how the other world interacts with ours is never really clear. Sometimes it seems the interaction is subtle – a window banging as if in the wind. Sometimes an item can be left in the real world, a more direct interaction, but why it's buried in the wall is unclear. But after all that, later events suggest that people trapped in Annwn are incapable of interacting with the living world at all. So the nature and explanation behind the articles in the wall require a lot of thought, but for most viewers they are more likely to be confusing than revealing.

 

I enjoy a movie that requires thought and fosters discussion. "The Dark" does this reasonably well with some aspects but overall ultimately suffers from being a little too confusing. I have my own interpretation, but it took 2 viewings and reading others' thoughts to really formulate them. The point is that there's a fine line between leaving the viewer in thought and leaving the viewer annoyingly confused. This movie predominantly does the latter.

 

Read a message board about the end and you'll see just about as many interpretations of the end as you do posters, and yet many of them have overlooked key points. It shouldn't be THAT hard to understand a movie. It's one thing for each viewer to get different personal meanings out of a story; it's another for viewers to be so unsure of what they just saw that nothing makes any sense to them.

 

With the inability to connect with the characters because of unclear relationships, unclear interactions between the worlds, and even some identity confusion towards the end, this might sound like an awful movie. It is confusing without a doubt, but it doesn't stink. Part of the salvation has to do with the cast. Sean Bean really sells himself as the worried father of a missing girl.

 

While the various scenes with Adelle don't form a strong enough narrative between her actions in the backstory and present events, Maria Bello sells the emotion of the scenes. She and Sean play off each other well. I just wish we had more information about their history. Maurice Roeves is the only other adult with a substantial role, and I like him every bit as much as the others.

 

There are two child roles. Sometimes kids can kill a movie, but not these. Sarah's interactions with her mother feel off to me, but I think that has more to do with the way they are written than how Sophie portrays them. Abbie Stone is particularly good as the creepy back-from-the-otherword Ebril.

 

The feel of the movie is another strong point. There's a great air of tension and uneasiness and an excellent creepy mood. The plight of the mother searching and the opening of the underworld really drew me in. I love the conflict created by James and Adelle's different approaches to Ebril.

 

So it's not all bad, not at all, and perhaps the original story ("Sheep" written by Simon Maginn) is more coherent than the screenplay although I've read that the plots are substantially different. If movie director John Fawcett could have tightened up the narrative this might have really been an exceptional movie.