Darkness

Darkness pays the price for wanting to have everything. Basically, it includes elements from almost all horror subgenres, from ghost story to hixploitation, but the blend doesn’t work very well. Or rather, it could work well formally, but the script fails to put it together in a sensible way. For instance, the only reason the Nazi child murderers are there is because. Fortunately, Herz manages to build such a good atmosphere that I didn’t mind the gratuitousness very much, you only begin to notice it afterwards. That atmosphere, by the way, is very specific and can’t be compared with American horror, old Euro-horror or even with Asian horror. It’s a purely Czech horror environment and we can’t get used to it from the film because there hasn’t been anything like that yet, though it could be easily followed up on (and hopefully it will). It left me with a feeling similar to the one I had one evening on a meadow with an abandoned church, under the rain in Šumava. The actors are decent overall, though their Czech is a little weird at times (but I think that foreigners could feel better about it, like us, if Darkness were to have a good English dubbing). (07/09/2009)

I know the co-author of the screenplay, Martin Němec, among other things as a skilled writer, whose short stories are exciting and are very diverse in terms of genre. It is therefore all the less clear to me why 90% of the dialogues sound like they were written by Arnošt Vašíček, and even attempts at conversational styling end in an epileptic spasm. Herz does a solid genre work, an imaginative shot flashes on the screen from time to time, and here and there a jump scare or the gloomy stylization of the environment work. The story is a classic cheap tale from an amateur fanzine, which need not have been so useless, if... It happened to include, above all, credibility, an overview of one's own derivation and more moderately guided actors. The way it is, Darkness is decent enough as a Czech television film despite its shortcomings. (02/14/2010)