Los Angeles Times

‘Dark Places’ feels rushed

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“Dark Places” is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s pleasurabl­y twisted novel published before “Gone Girl,” yet it feels like something rushed and imitative of the writer’s blackly comic sensibilit­y.

Charlize Theron plays a cynical wreck named Libby Day, who at 7 survived the brutal massacre of her sisters and mother (in flashbacks, Christina Hendricks). For 30 years she has coasted on the dwindling financial goodwill of strangers.

When true-crime fanatics called the Kill Club (led by Nicholas Hoult) enlists her to exonerate Libby’s brother Ben, convicted as a teen (and played by Corey Stoll in the present-day prison scenes), she begins doubting her long-held version of that night. It’s a premise that proved catnip for Flynn’s brand of not-what-it-seems plotting, interior monologue and jabs at our murder-mad media world.

But in writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s hands, it’s a convoluted, airless procedural that generates practicall­y no suspense and little that’s thematical­ly resonant about lost souls and poisoned memories. It plays instead like the movie edit of a miniseries, grasping for coherence, with exposition-spitting actors relegated to surface venality, machinelik­e momentum and flashbacks that in some cases — involving young Ben and an edgy girlfriend (Chloe Grace Moretz) — aren’t flashbacks given that Libby couldn’t have seen them.

Theron is allowed a few charged moments, but on the whole “Dark Places” is strictly low-wattage.

— Robert Abele “Dark Places.” MPAA rating: R for disturbing violence, language, drug use, sexual content. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes. Playing: ArcLight Hollywood; MGN Five Star, Glendale; Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena. Also on VOD.

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