When bad movies happen to bad people
Film is a murky morass as extra stuff weighs down the mystery
DARK PLACES Rating:
Starring: Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks Directed by: Gilles Paquet-Brenner
Running time: 113 minutes
Gillian Flynn’s mysteries tend to emerge from a singular foundation — everyone in her stories is compromised, if not outright horrible. Everyone is a suspect because everyone is out to selfishly save their own hides. The question, then, is, who is most willing to shuck off petty morals for their own benefit?
If her bestseller status as novelist proves she’s able to skip lightly over top of this murky morass, on film you need someone with the ruthless efficiency of David Fincher to keep the suspense going, or else you run the risk of getting bogged down in a story of bad people drearily mucking their way to the end.
Unfortunately, Dark Places writer/director Gilles Paquet-Brenner is no Fincher.
Our guide through this mess is Libby Day (Charlize Theron), the survivor of a family massacre on a decrepit Kansas farm in the mid-’80s. Since blaming her metalhead/possible devil-worshipping brother Ben (Corey Stoll), for the killings, Libby tells us she’s mostly led a life of nothing, living off the donations strangers sent in support of the sad story of the year. With that money running out — there’s always a new girl suffering from tragedy, her accountant bleakly shrugs — she’s forced to hoover up funds from a bizarre little “kill club” lead by Lyle (Nicholas Hoult), while she investigates their theory that her brother didn’t actually do it.
This is supposed to provoke some reckoning in Libby, who is surprisingly candid about how little she actually remembers from her young life, but most of her inner turmoil is glossed over as the film wades through the rather expansive list of potential murderers who were circling the family at the time.
Told concurrently through Libby’s investigations and flashbacks to the ’80s, the narrative drags in everything from the Satanic panic of the day, to your more garden-variety deadbeat dads and secretly pregnant girlfriends.
All this extra stuff doesn’t really stoke the mystery so much as weigh it down, and the generally lively Theron looks every bit like someone struggling under the burden of a heavy load. Surrounded either by flat nothings (Hoult’s character might as well be named Plot D. Vice), or some unfortunate overacting (Chloë Grace Moretz, as the young girlfriend is painful in nearly every scene), she attacks the case with all the fury of a commuter absent-mindedly playing Sudoku, and the dark mood slowly dissipates as the mystery shambles along to its ridiculous, unearned conclusion.
(Adherents to the Ebert school of noting conspicuously extraneous plot details, should peg this one from about the first 10 minutes.)
By the end, it’s neither really a story of reconciliation nor a particularly gripping thriller, just a chance to join the kill club as they wade through misery and miserable people under the guise of puzzle-solving. We would have been better off leaving Libby to her torpor.