Crew
Director – Audrey Cummings, Screenplay – R.J. Lackie, Producer – Jay Bennett, Photography – James Griffith, Music – Jim McGrath, Visual Effects – Technicolor Toronto (Supervisor – Kevin Chandoo), Production Design – Ciara Vernon. Production Company – Shaftesbury/Telefilm Canada/Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Cast
Bea Santos (Eve), Olunike Adeliyi (Kali), Christine Horne (Clarity), Ari Millen (Martin), Zoe Belkin (Mercy), Jon McLaren (Taro), Dmitry Chepovetsky (Ralston), Gabrielle Graham (Karisse), Paul Amos (Wren), Rob Archer (Bard)
Plot
The nurse Eve goes to the aid of Karisse, a woman who has fallen wounded on the steps of a building. Eve enters the building to the find that she is now in a different realm – a world that seems to exist of endless interconnected rooms. She is captured and taken before Clarity, who rules the realm with an autocratic hand in the name of Mother Darken, who went missing some time ago. It causes a stir when they realise that Eve has come in from outside. Eve makes an escape with Kali and the mute Mercy, who are both charged with being Exiles by Clarity. As Eve seeks a way out of the labyrinth, Clarity sends her troops hunting them.
Audrey Cummings is a Canadian director who premiered with the babysitter stalker film Berkshire Country (2014). Darken was her second film and she followed that with She Never Died (2019) and the Western Place of Bones (2023), while she has also produced the horror film Anything for Jackson (2020).
From an initial description “In a parallel universe made up of maze-like rooms, the inhabitants are protected by its altruistic overseer Mother Darken. When an outsider accidentally finds her way in, she becomes entwined in a bloody revolutionary battle,” Darken sounds like it is going to be something interesting – a venture into a secondary world, possibly some kind of Labyrinth.
The disappointment of Darken once we get inside its parallel universe is how utterly mundane and uninteresting the world created is. All that Audrey Cummings has done is shot on the cheap in several buildings and halls and reduced the lighting levels. There is really nothing more to the film than people running and hiding through a series of abandoned hallways while engaged in some kind of overthrow of a quasi-theocracy. There is no real rhyme or reason to this world – what is outside the endless hallways? Where does the electricity for the lights come from? How do the objects that are from this world like shotguns and the pipes on the walls get transposed over? It is a fantasy world that seems direly needs some kind of explanation.
It is also a world of little depth. All it consists of people in junkyard chic that used to be the default wear for numerous Mad Max copies saying a bunch of cryptic phrases. There is an autocratic religion in the world that appears to have been usurped by Christine Horne’s brutal hand, but we never learn what they believe in. The rest of the film is people fighting against the system while being pursued. It is a secondary world fantasy of cardboard engagement and no interesting depths that fails to engender any interest in what transpires. About the only plus is Olunike Adeliyi who does a fierce variant on the warrior woman trope.
Audrey Cummings also directed Darken: Before the Dark (2018), a digital series that tells the origin story of the people who live inside the world, consisting of eleven episodes between 2-5 minutes each, produced for the KindaTV YouTube channel.
Trailer here