Best friends Stephanie (Amber Heard) and Ellie (Odette Yustman) decide to spend the final days of an Argentinian cycling holiday separated from their group and hanging out and getting drunk in a remote rural village. After getting to know a couple of the locals and a fellow American, Michael (Karl Urban), on their first night the pair are feeling a little hungover the following day and head to a nearby waterfall to recuperate. Following an argument about the previous night, mostly surrounding Ellie’s promiscuity and Stephanie’s chastity, Stephanie rides off leaving Ellie alone. After cooling off Stephanie decides to return but Ellie has disappeared. Fearing something dreadful might have happened to Ellie Stephanie begins searching and uncovers a dark side to the rural village.

Making a film is not an easy task. Not just successfully making a film of quality, although that’s certainly not a simple and unproblematic goal to achieve, simply writing a film, shooting a film, editing a film and getting it in front of an audience takes hard work. The basic production and distribution of a feature film is a large undertaking and one that takes a lot of dedication and a serious investment on the part of those involved. One of the most baffling things therefore about And Soon The Darkness and many films of the same ilk is why did anyone bother.

This might sound like a childish and flippant dismissal but it is meant in a serious way and made with a genuine consideration of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. It is not to say that everything about the film is lacking in any quality at all, Heard is pretty adequate in the underwritten role of Stephanie for instance, or to suggest that the filmmakers shouldn’t have bothered. It is just intriguing to wonder why the film was ever made. Many motivations come in to play around a film’s production. To name just a few, there is the burning desire to tell a particular story, the uncontrollable urge to express something through art, the attempt to try something new or different and of course the belief that you can make a decent profit. The motivations of the filmmakers tend to bleed into a film thereby making them (or a rough idea of them) relatively easily identifiable to even the most uninterested viewer.

It is strange therefore to watch And Soon The Darkness and find no discernible motivation. Films do not necessarily need to have some grand purpose, a deep and profound point to them, but you do have to wonder why someone would spend so much time, effort and money on something for no apparent purpose at all. And Soon The Darkness doesn’t appear to have any real commercial aspirations, they would have changed the clunky title for a start (although it shares this with the original film of which it is a loose remake), as aside from being reasonably easily marketable to the loyal but often short changed horror crowd it has little to make it stand out from any other film in an already overstuffed genre.

So does it work simply as an effective shocker, filled with thrills and exciting scares? Far from it. The film is moribund from the outset, leadenly paced and lacking in anything close to effective tension. Key to the success of any film is the competency of all the mechanics of filmmaking. A ‘genre’ director such as John Carpenter, for instance, understands how cinema works and his films, with a couple of exceptions, follow tried and tested techniques to ensure the story is told in a expert way and the audience is effectively engaged with what they are viewing. When Michael Myers gets up in Halloween it’s not just random luck and the idea that it will ‘look cool’ that makes it so effective, it’s careful framing, editing, scoring and so on.

And Soon The Darkness seems to pay little attention to these important details of filmmaking. Sure, there are observing POV shots and other such techniques but there is little consistency or competency in their use. When Stephanie and Ellie strip down to their bikinis in the scene by the waterfall the camera lingers over their bodies it does not seem motivated by an attempt at engaging with ideas surrounding complicit scopophilia or even to try for some commercial titillation, the scene just seems to be there because that’s the kind of scene you put in a film ‘like this’ and that’s kind of how people normally shoot it.

Later on the film also reaches what could have been a thrilling highpoint as Stephanie finds Ellie in a derelict building and attempts to rescue her from her tormentor. Hiding behind pillars Stephanie approaches the captor, all the time avoiding being seen by ducking between pillars. Any suspense in this scene disintegrates when little attention is observed to simple issues like eye-lines in the editing and shot composition (see the below for an example). The sound design is also so deliberately sparse, concealing the natural sounds that Stephanie would make as she moves, that it is far too clearly manipulated and sounds ridiculous as a result. Implausibility shatters any verisimilitude and robs the scene of what should make it tense and thrilling.

With no interesting ideas explored and the basics of making an entertaining film scarcely present the level to which And Soon The Darkness is bland is almost remarkable and like the hard to pin down motivations it is hard to pin down any idea of who an appreciative audience for this film might be.

And Soon The Darkness is available to buy or rent on DVD now.

The DVD features a short compilation of deleted scenes that reveal the even worse footage that was left on the cutting room floor and a trailer for the film. The picture and sound quality on the DVD is adequate.

Film [Rating:1/5]

DVD [Rating:2/5]