Crew
Director – Andrew Cumming, Screenplay – Ruth Greenberg, Story – Andrew Cumming, Ruth Greenberg & Oliver Kassman, Producer – Oliver Kassman, Photography – Ben Fordesman, Music – Adam Janota Bzowski, Visual Effects – Goldcrest Post Production (Supervisor – Chris Forrester), Special Effects Supervisor – Mike Kelt, Makeup Design – Niamh Morrison, Production Design – Jamie Lapsley. Production Company – Escape Plan.
Cast
Iola Evans (Ave), Arno Lning (Odal), Chuku Modu (Adem), Luna Mwezi (Heron), Safia Oakley-Green (Beyah), Kit Young (Geirr), Rosebud Melarkey & Tyrell Mhlanga (The Neanderthals)
Plot
45,000 years ago. A small group of cave people struggle to survive. Their search for a new land takes them through a forest. However, as they journey, something starts to attack and kill members of the group. They are rent by fear and divisions from within as to what the threat is and how to deal with it.
Films dealing with Prehistory have been with us since the silent era and the likes of The Cave Man (1912), D.W. Griffith’s Man’s Genesis (1912) and Willis O’Brien’s The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915). The genre reached a peak with works such as One Million B.C. (1940) and Ray Harryhausen’s One Million B.C. (1966). By the time of the latter, we also saw the beginnings of a less-than-serious take on things with tv’s The Flintstones (1960-6).
Around 1981, things started to change. Beginning with Quest for Fire (1981), one of the best films in the genre, we saw prehistoric dramas move towards the relatively more anthropologically realistic ie. no cavepeope interacting with dinosaurs. This take was followed in a number of films that came after with the likes of Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), 10,000 B.C. (2008), Alpha (2018) and In the Blink of an Eye (2026). The same time has also seen the rise of comedies like Caveman (1981), The Croods (2013) and Early Man (2018) or animated films about prehistoric talking animals such as The Land Before Time (1988) and sequels, Dinosaur (2000), Ice Age (2002) and sequels and The Good Dinosaur (2015).
Out of Darkness falls into the category of these anthropologically realistic films. The landscape has an impressive wildness – it reminds something of the primordial world evoked in Valhalla Rising (2009) – filmed with some impressive drone shots drifting across raw, mist-cloaked Scottish landscapes. There is nothing of the heroism of films like One Million Years B.C. or Quest for Fire here, this is a work of harsh survivalism where a small group of frail survivors who have little clue what is going on try to deal with an unseen enemy and fractiousness from within.
A good many of these prehistoric films show the cavepeople on a journey for better lands – Quest for Fire, The Land Before Time, Dinosaur, The Croods, several of the Ice Age films. Unlike these other prehistoric films, the unusual step director Andrew Cumming takes is to frame Out of Darkness in terms of a horror film. There is the intriguing pitch “In the Old Stone Age, a disparate gang of early humans band together in search of a new land. But when they suspect a malevolent, mystical being is hunting them down, the clan are forced to confront a danger they never envisioned.” This makes the film seem almost an existential horror film – cave men vs a nameless terror hunting them as they cross the landscape.
The disappointment of Out of Darkness is that it does a great job building up the idea of this threat, but the eventual revelation is a far less interesting and mundane than anything you expect. [PLOT SPOILERS]. The threat ends up being merely another family of primitives defending their territory. A reading of the end credits reveals that these are holdover Neanderthals. Now the idea of conflict between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis is an fascinating one for a film to take up. It reminds of the ending The 13th Warrior (1999). However, the great pitfall of a prehistoric drama like this is that in only being relayed through made-up language, none of this is apparent within the film itself until you read the end credits – all that we see up on screen is just a work about cavemen being harassed by other cavemen.
Out of Darkness was a feature-length directorial debut for Andrew Cumming who had previously conducted episodic work in British tv. The film played some film festivals in 2022 and 2023 but did not receive a full release until 2024.
Trailer here