Arthouse films are definitely a niche market, I think it’s fair to say, and that bottleneck only seems to become slimmer still when you make a genre film out of it too.
When I saw, then, that there was a black and white arthouse horror movie on the market, I couldn’t help but point my throbbing curiosity wand in its general direction and blast glamorous glitter at it from afar.
What does that mean, you ask?
I’ve no idea, yet here we are and I’ve started now and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Darling is an independent 80-minute flick (so not so tedious to get through as The Neon Demon which may as well have been an episode of Sex in the City with pretentious camera angles and snazzy lighting) where we meet a young lady who is housesitting a fancy-ass gaff out in Manhattan where she slowly (albeit rather quickly) descends into madness.
Now, going in, I pretty much had a rough idea of what I was getting myself into, seeing as it was written and directed by Mickey Keating, who was responsible for the fuck-awful Sci-Fi Horror Movie Pod, and didn’t set my standards or expectations too high.
So, all that being said, I was actually really impressed with this feature. I don’t know if it was because I lowered my expectations, but this was genuinely a decent film.
The acting from our classically beautiful leading lady (Lauren Ashley Carter) gave the film the underlying intensity that it deserved, and the Hitchcockian-style direction and cinematography was bang on the money without getting too artsy-fartsy and actually nailed the atmospheric undertones that it had originally pursued.
Now, this isn’t a movie without its flaws, of course it isn’t. It commits the crime of going too deep into dialog as though the characters know there’s an audience that need to be filled in, which personally I think is a crime worth punishable by firing squad, and it also seems to jump forward quite a lot in the story with no indication of time-frame, so what seems like a day or two might actually be a few months!
Who knows?!
It also does scenes in chapters, which I feel is a little overused in art films, but when it’s done right (like in this film and Lars Von Trier’s masterpiece Anti-Christ), it can actually tie the story up quite nicely, so hats off for that one!
Aaron's Spoiler-Free Rating: All in all, this wasn’t a bad movie and is definitely a popcorn flick with cracking editing and a genuine sense of foreboding throughout. – 6.5/10
Aaron James Waters is a best-selling Pulp Fiction writer who has written more books than he's actually read.
He's also the rotten apple of the group who thinks this whole Star Wars thing needs to hurry up and die already.
You can find Aaron's debut novel on Amazon!
