Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Dark Places Blu-ray Movie Review

Gone Woman.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 9, 2015

Gillian Flynn took quite a bit of heat, deserved or otherwise, for what some saw as a bit of misdirectional subterfuge informing huge swaths of her international sensation Gone Girl. There’s perhaps less overt subversion taking place in Flynn’s Dark Places, though this film shares Gone Girl’s cynical take on pop culture (including media sensations) as well as a convoluted plot that, while not deliberately misleading in the way Gone Girl was, slowly reveals that what is assumed to have happened is not exactly what really happened. Dark Places marks the first English language feature by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner, whose 2010 opus Sarah's Key also exploited a wounded female heroine whose dysfunctional family history plays out over some ping ponging timeframes. Dark Places concerns an infamous decades old murder at a Kansas farmhouse (shades of In Cold Blood) which left virtually an entire family dead— save for the family’s youngest daughter, Libby Day (Sterling Jerins), who survived and pointed the finger at her brother, Ben (Tye Sheridan). In the contemporary time frame, a now grown Libby (Charlize Theron) has adjusted to a difficult life of weird celebrity which provided her with just enough money to “do nothing” courtesy of donations mailed in by curious folks over the course of several years. Unfortunately, with Libby now an adult and so many other more provocative murder sprees having cornered the “market”, the donations have dried up and Libby is facing pretty dire financial straits. When she receives a weird letter from a guy named Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult), who belongs to a “Kill Club” which investigates old cases, her need for scratch overcomes her natural proclivities toward being left alone, and she agrees to meet the other Club members for a rather paltry sum. That sets a whole chain of events into motion, which ultimately uncovers a knotty complex of old secrets and casts a new, disturbing light on the long ago murders that continue to spill into the lives of both Libby, and indeed Ben (Corey Stoll as an adult), who has spent close to three decades in prison for the crimes.

Dark Places begins with an appropriately dark scene that seems to be someone saying goodnight to a child, a scene which the film will return to with a somewhat different meaning after a course of several interstitial revelations. Libby’s voiceover alerts the viewer that the character is steely but vulnerable, unable to escape the memory of the brutal murder of her mother Patty (Christina Hendricks in flashbacks) and older sisters. Libby may attempt to hide beneath a low slung baseball cap, but once she starts interacting with the Kill Club, the character undergoes a perhaps false feeling metamorphosis, suddenly interested in investigating a crime which she herself “solved” as a child and which, while haunting, has had its resolution never seriously questioned before.

There are a number of rather unseemly (and in some cases downright smarmy) characters running through Dark Places, especially in the flashback sequences, which see Patty desperately trying to deal with a family spinning out of her control, and her own desperate finances presaging what will happen later to Libby herself. Ben gets involved in some questionable activities, but is perhaps unfairly accused of even others, all while taking up with a duplicitous girl named Diondra (Chloë Grace Moretz), a schemer whose machinations turn out to be the fulcrum around which much of the plot hinges, something that Paquet-Brenner's adaptive screenplay does little to mask (in other words, there’s very little of that infamous Gone Girl misdirection).

Another simultaneously unfolding flashback plot arc details Patty’s travails, and this strand, like that involving young Ben, sets up some intriguing mysteries which Paquet-Brenner handles a bit more discursively than the Ben arc, but still wraps up surprisingly straightforwardly, with few if any red herrings standing between perspicacious viewers and various denouements. Dark Places does a moody job of peeling back a supposedly sylvan rural environment to reveal a wealth of creepy crawlies ferreting around underneath. The film's twofold timeframe structure is problematic at times, though, with Paquet-Brenner struggling to make the two disparate eras properly inform each other courtesy of editing and an almost assumed montage theory. Instead, the film seems to be comprised more like a series of interconnected vignettes, some admittedly arresting, but others relatively lackluster.

Theron is curt and distant as Libby, perhaps appropriately so, but her characterization is so prickly that some may have a hard time feeling empathy, let alone sympathy, for her (especially once some revelations paint even her in a different light). Hoult is kind of a cipher as the geeky Lyle, serving mostly as a sparring partner for Libby in various expository dialogues, as well as providing a couple of important investigative jolts to the story. Sheridan brings a doleful eyed countenance to the befuddled young Ben, while Moretz comes closest to Grand Guignol territory in a couple of florid scenes that seem tonally at odds with the grittier, more realistic, ambience the rest of the film provides. Hendricks is quite affecting in her few scenes as Patty.

Dark Places Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Dark Places is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Digitally shot with the Arri Alexa, Dark Places struggles at times to provide substantial detail due to its emphasis on its (titular?) dark places. From the first moment of the film, many (at times long) scenes play out in shrouded environments or near darkness, with only snippets of detail (like sides of faces, or things like a hand) being readily visible. Paquet-Brenner and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd also toy with bells and whistles like overly "grainy" flashbacks, as well as quite a few black and white sequences (again consigned to flashbacks). When the film ventures out into the bright midwestern sunlight, detail pops much better, though some scenes have been color graded fairly aggressively (once again utilizing the kind of sickly yellow tones that seem to be unavoidable). In these brighter moments, detail and fine detail are often quite striking, offering nice views of smaller elements like the ribbing in a seatbelt or the texture of Libby's ubiquitous baseball cap. Despite the near constant darkness and digital photography, there are no compression artifacts and/or noise to speak of.

Dark Places Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Dark Places' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track has some moments of forceful LFE and bombast courtesy of scenes like a club Libby ventures into (before venturing into the Kill Club, in fact), but otherwise tends to be somewhat more subtle addressing ambient environmental sounds that evoke the rural environment that a lot of the film takes place in. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly and is well prioritized. There are a couple of whispered elements that are perhaps willfully mixed a bit low in order to increase the mystery, though optional subtitles can soon put an end to any perceived enigma.

Dark Places Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bringing Dark Places to Light (1080i; 23:08) contains some above average interviews with the likes of Flynn and Theron.


• About the Author: Gillian Flynn and Dark Places (1080i; 9:16) contains more good interview footage with Flynn. Both this featurette and the above featurette offer disclaimers warning viewers from watching them before the film due to spoilers.

Dark Places Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are several interesting elements at play in Dark Places, but the film never hangs together as artfully as Gone Girl. The bifurcated time period approach tends to give the narrative a kind of lurching quality, and the interlocked mysteries involving Ben and Patty are so routinely (and quickly) solved that there's little chance for anxiety to build appropriately. Still, performances are often raw and quite interesting, and fans of the cast may well want to check this out as a curiosity if for no other reason. Technical merits are generally very strong for those considering a purchase.