The film is not a high budget affair at all, which is mostly evidenced in the opening scene dealing with the car crash. I’ve seen low budget films be very creative given the restraints of their budgets but this scene was not handled with much imagination at all. Fortunately this was mostly just to set the stage for what was to come but it did give me pause as first impressions count for a lot, especially in the opening of a film.
Still going into it with this firmly in mind now I could see how the director was trying to make the most of their limited resources. The film is not ambitious in terms of set pieces or locations, keeping the scenes confined to basically three rooms and the crash site. The main focus here is going to be character interaction and dialogue set against the count down timer of Alex’s injuries being slowly fatal if left untreated.
I can see why Loken might have been chosen for the roll, the majority of her film career has been filled with physically demanding roles requiring her to be cyborg killing machines, martial artists and vampires. Half of her time on screen is spent contorting herself into some uncomfortable positions within the mangled car due to her leg being stuck in the wreckage. She performs admirably here and she very convincingly portrays pain and fatigue.
Her acting in the more dramatic parts of the film her likely concussed brain walks her through memories, speaking with ghosts, fictional characters and perhaps even God himself in the form of a dog is still pretty good but sometimes uneven. Though I think this is more a directional/dialogue issue, as sometimes I was very into Alex traipsing through her mind for the answers to both the plague and her own personal grief while at other times this could feel like a Hallmark or Lifetime movie. Now there is nothing particularly wrong with those films in general but it didn’t feel right for this Covid/Pandemic inspired near apocalypse.
Which is why I think Loken could be uneven because the story itself felt so. The situation is treated as extremely dire due to a probability that only one percent of the population will survive the plague but because it is VERY based on a situation we have all gone through, including two years of separation and lockdown, I didn’t feel like the world was in such desperate trouble. This is reinforced by seeing a couple living safely and happily alone nearby. The film tells us things are awful but fails to really show us how bad it is out there.
Martin Kove as Dad is the standout in this film. Nothing uneven here, he comes across as completely believable and I found myself wanting to spend more time with this character and his daughter as they resolved their personal issues and worked to solve the pandemic problem.
Courtney Warner as Alex’s sister though just felt like acting every time I saw her. She’s not bad per say but I just kept seeing an actress and not a character. Gabrielle Kalomiris plays the fictional character Amazonia who also represents Alex’s deceased daughter does a fair job having to balance comic opera dialogue with a few bits of actual drama. The rest of the cast is serviceable enough given how small the parts are.
This is the only film I’ve seen by this director thus far so I can only judge by this effort. It’s not an outstanding film, it has some good ideas and some solid moments and I like the exploration of one’s life through the lucid dreaming used here. But there are some plot holes and a lack of sense of a properly established world. I wasn’t feeling the sense of urgency that I believe the film wanted me to, either for the fate of humanity or Alex herself. In the end, it was ok but not something I’d likely ever revisit.
SCORE:
2.5 out of 5
Dark Night of the Soul is produced by Tom Malloy (Ask Me to Dance) and Charlie Shrem (Trauma Therapy: Psychosis), with Brock Pierce, Jeremy Gardner, Brandon Goldman, and John Przybylinski serving as Executive Producers.
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