A body, and a severed foot, which does not belong to said body, wash up on the beach of a small town outside of Jacksonville, Florida. The local police, who have only one detective on staff, suspect it might be the third (plus a bit) body from the same murderer. The city authorities bring in another, recently disgraced, so-called ‘Gypsy Cop,’ with a history of alcohol and violence, who grew up in the town decades ago, as much to get rid of a problem, as it is to help get to the bottom of what is now potentially a serial killer. What could possibly go awry?
The wonderfully named Mitchell Morse is that classic broken, weary, detective with relationship issues, hollowed-out eyes, and obsessive workaholism. He is assigned a younger, more unstable and hot-headed partner, to help him track down a serial killer. A routine staple of crime-procedural films, from Seven, to Memories of Murder, and HBOs True Detective, all of which, more or less use this template, where the originality or success often come down to the unique setting, the general themes, and the specific partner-partner relationship.
With its swampy coastal Florida location rendered via grainy super 16mm filmstock, and truly exceptional interior production design (for a film this indie) dominantly coloured in a kind of stained nicotine brown and yellow, contrasted with muted sand and foam of the beach-town exteriors, Dark My Light nails the first criterion in spades. Its ambitious, often maddening, structure (to go further into it, is well into spoiler territory) offers plenty of off-kilter mystery. It is a Schrödinger’s Cat and Mouse game, not so much with the killer, but what is actually going on with the film itself.
In spite of solid editing, and scattering of clues and information, that the narrative chooses to do the night-and-day partner thing, but then splits the relationship-building time between both Morse’s wife, Emily, and his shady new partner, Trier dilutes what could have been a novel post-modern detective movie.
With its swampy coastal Florida location rendered via grainy super 16mm filmstock, and truly exceptional interior production design (for a film this indie) dominantly coloured in a kind of stained nicotine brown and yellow, contrasted with muted sand and foam of the beach-town exteriors, Dark My Light nails the first criterion in spades. Its ambitious, often maddening, structure (to go further into it, is well into spoiler territory) offers plenty of off-kilter mystery. It is a Schrödinger’s Cat and Mouse game, not so much with the killer, but what is actually going on with the film itself.
In spite of solid editing, and scattering of clues and information, that the narrative chooses to do the night-and-day partner thing, but then splits the relationship-building time between both Morse’s wife, Emily, and his shady new partner, Trier dilutes what could have been a novel post-modern detective movie.
Dark My Light is very much out of time and place. It is obviously set in the modern day, with recent-model cars and iPhones and laptop computers, but its design aesthetic is aiming for that period of desaturated ochre-brown filmmaking of the likes of Deliverance or McCabe And Mrs. Miller. I relished that craft on display, and the discombobulation it engenders. Kudos to production designer Shawn Carroll, costume designer Constance Lee and cinematographer Charles Ackley Anderson (who worked on David Lowery’s and career capstone for Robert Redford, The Old Man & The Gun). The filmmaking is often impeccable, from how the detectives enter and exit the frame, to the use of depth of space within the frame.
Two particularly satisfying examples of this: Morse making a phone call from inside a dimly lit beach house, framed by one bright window, while his partner is on the sandy crime scene outside, and happens to be on the other end of the phone call. Even moreso, an impressive character building sequence between Morse and his estranged wife, involves separate, adjacent, bedrooms with the door open lit by end-table lamps. He is shown laying down in the mirror on the while, while she is far off in the back in the master bedroom. They each speak, and turn on and turn off the lights in a sequence that really is fabulous, and what good direction is all about.
The film is not without its flaws. The narrative struggles with balancing the strong relationships, while keeping the story itself on track. I love that Dark My Light is character first, everything else second; and that it offers plenty of time for each scene to play out, or repeat. This is often at the expense of the actual serial killer investigation playing so far in the background, that when it is re-foregrounded with new reveals and attempts at structural clarity, the feeling is often more flustering than ‘tumblers clicking into place.’
I get that everything, character-wise, and plot-wise, ties together here in oblique and ‘small towns are quiet and complicated, and so are some marriages’ kind of way, but at a slim 88 minutes, there is only so much time to build the skeleton and is not quite enough meat on the bones to really bite into. This can be, well, a bit frustrating, considering the filmmakers are also interested in post-modern genre fusions on top of everything else.
The central triangle of performances, Albert Jones (who visibly ages over the course of the film, but looks posh in a brown derby), Keesha Sharp as his sharp and self-reflective wife, and Tom Lipinski (here the unlikely lovechild of Josh Brolin and Jon Bernthal) are memorable and know how to toss back and forth a glance or movement within a scene. The dialogue, when it does not get too purple or exposition heavy, works in fits and starts with Cormac McCarthyisms like, “All scars have to start somewhere,” being the high watermark, but duplicate monologues on the concept of motive being less so, and hammering things a bit to heavy handed.
Not at all lacking in ambition, writer-director Neal Dhand has serious chops. In his feature film debut he may have overstuffed the game, which has complex, adult relationships at its core, but wanders off its beach threshold, and into the riptide, when trying to cram one, or two, too many genres into a small puzzle-box. While we do find out where body and the unrelated foot originally came from, it lacks a certain goose-bump satisfaction, in large part because that is not really what the film really wants to be about.
Two particularly satisfying examples of this: Morse making a phone call from inside a dimly lit beach house, framed by one bright window, while his partner is on the sandy crime scene outside, and happens to be on the other end of the phone call. Even moreso, an impressive character building sequence between Morse and his estranged wife, involves separate, adjacent, bedrooms with the door open lit by end-table lamps. He is shown laying down in the mirror on the while, while she is far off in the back in the master bedroom. They each speak, and turn on and turn off the lights in a sequence that really is fabulous, and what good direction is all about.
The film is not without its flaws. The narrative struggles with balancing the strong relationships, while keeping the story itself on track. I love that Dark My Light is character first, everything else second; and that it offers plenty of time for each scene to play out, or repeat. This is often at the expense of the actual serial killer investigation playing so far in the background, that when it is re-foregrounded with new reveals and attempts at structural clarity, the feeling is often more flustering than ‘tumblers clicking into place.’
I get that everything, character-wise, and plot-wise, ties together here in oblique and ‘small towns are quiet and complicated, and so are some marriages’ kind of way, but at a slim 88 minutes, there is only so much time to build the skeleton and is not quite enough meat on the bones to really bite into. This can be, well, a bit frustrating, considering the filmmakers are also interested in post-modern genre fusions on top of everything else.
The central triangle of performances, Albert Jones (who visibly ages over the course of the film, but looks posh in a brown derby), Keesha Sharp as his sharp and self-reflective wife, and Tom Lipinski (here the unlikely lovechild of Josh Brolin and Jon Bernthal) are memorable and know how to toss back and forth a glance or movement within a scene. The dialogue, when it does not get too purple or exposition heavy, works in fits and starts with Cormac McCarthyisms like, “All scars have to start somewhere,” being the high watermark, but duplicate monologues on the concept of motive being less so, and hammering things a bit to heavy handed.
Not at all lacking in ambition, writer-director Neal Dhand has serious chops. In his feature film debut he may have overstuffed the game, which has complex, adult relationships at its core, but wanders off its beach threshold, and into the riptide, when trying to cram one, or two, too many genres into a small puzzle-box. While we do find out where body and the unrelated foot originally came from, it lacks a certain goose-bump satisfaction, in large part because that is not really what the film really wants to be about.
Dark My Light releases today, May 6th, on VOD.