The Dark Place

This must be my lucky day. Two bad movies, back to back, :sad: :sigh: Someone, please recommend me a good movie soon. Anyway, coming back to this film, I didn’t expect much from it anyway in the first place. So that way, I wasn’t very disappointed. To be fair to the film, it wasn’t horrible. It was just bad. Poor acting and no emotional connect between characters is a major issue. And when as an audience, that doesn’t happen, then already the film has lost me as an audience, and all I do is watch the movie from a plastic audience with no emotional connect. Gay horror/mystery genre is not much explored and rightly so because most of it is downright terrible. Sadly, this movie as well does nothing to salvage that reputation.

Keegan has Hyperthymesia & he cannot forget anything, ever. He is incredibly smart and perceptive, which causes him issues dealing with other people. Even with his boyfriend Will, this causes a concern all the time but thankfully Will is an understanding guy. Keegan decides to visit his mom in suburbs and takes along Will with him. Once there, he finds out that his mom has married a man named Adrien whom she met at a cruise and who has a son Jake. Keegan finds something about the father-son duo very odd and warns about it to his mother and Will but neither of them take him seriously given his smartass attitude and him being a recovering alcoholic. We also meet his childhood friend Ernie, who is now a lawyer and helping Keegan’s mother Celeste make a large sum of money from the winery, and it is soon to become open to the public. Will, having had enough of Keegan’s secrets and sarcasm, leaves and Keegan is forced to face his damaged mental health. His mother Celeste falls in a sudden coma on the day of IPO and everyone including police suspects Keegan to be prime suspect for money reasons. Nowhere to run around to, he reaches out to Ernie. Keegan finds the strength to sort through the multitude of memories in his brain to figure out the clues and connections between everything going on, or he will also face a certain death, but at whose hands? Things start getting clear at the end, when it is revealed that this was all a pre-planned effort by Jake-Adrien-Ernie to get a hold of all of Celeste’s money. As expected, all things fall back in place.

Keegan acted well in the movie and so did Celeste. She was the one saving grace of the film but besides that, most sequences seemed too convenient and straight forward. The way entire mystery is resolved and how Keegan goes about finding the clues from Jake’s ex-girlfriend etc and very convenient. It feels that Jake-Adrien have a past and it just takes us a while to find out how this whole story will play out and that itself tests patience. The dialogues are a bot over the top and the execution leaves a lot to be desired. This is a good video film but given the huge leaps and bounds we have taken wrt story and execution, this film falls short and comes out as still amateurish. And since, it is gay and horror, there were a lot of scenes thrown in of shirtless men and even 2 sex scenes but neither of these really added anything to the homo-eroticism. Thankfully, characters being gay was just a part of the film rather being the sole focus and that was refreshing.

The film is definitely not a shaker but is neither downright bad. Makers need to work on making characters believable. Just mouthing heavy-duty dialogues while playing a shallow character doesn’t cut the deal. (4/10)