A Dark Song (2016)

October 23, 2018 6:21 PM

A determined young woman and a damaged occultist risk their lives and souls to perform a dangerous ritual that will grant them what they want. 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
posted by DirtyOldTown (10 comments total)

If the film had taken a different turn, it could have been an occult take on kitchen sink drama, like some Ken Loach or Mike Leigh characters who'd wandered off the estate and tried their hand at the dark arts. These are really resonant characters, really working their way through very real pain. The exhausting/tedious/difficult nature of the ritual they build is like a genre film translation of the very real emotional work people do to get over psychological damage. The fact that their ritual actually works takes it somewhere else, but it all felt of a piece.

Some people will probably be rankled by the ending. I was not. I really liked it. The angel's sad smile as she made her wish. Just perfect.

This is one of the very best independent horror films of the last 10-15 years.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:29 PM on October 23, 2018 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I thought it was an excellent film until the last ten minutes or so. I liked its vision of magic as something one has to really sacrifice for and invest time in--rather like Primer's attitude towards time travel. And it was effectively tense since it tells you very little about either person and gives you reason to suspect each person's motives. I thought the buildup was masterful. It was done in a way that let you wonder whether magic was real or she was just hallucinating because she was depriving herself of so many things...

But then the muddy creeps were a let down. And after repeated mentions of how tragic it would be if a certain law of magic was trespassed upon, once it occurs the film seemed to suggest something incredible and terrifying had happened, but then it backed away to a much warmer ending.

I think I took it at face value, and perhaps I shouldn't because your assessment of its message sounds accurate.
posted by heatvision at 3:36 AM on October 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

This film had such a great bleak atmosphere. The soundtrack was great, too, especially this piece.
posted by dng at 6:16 AM on October 24, 2018

I think it's important that the ritual succeeds for her, as otherwise the message of the film would go from "You may have go through unspeakably dark times to get through loss" to "Not even heaven and not even hell can help you when you lose a child."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:21 AM on October 24, 2018

Bonus: director Liam Gavin's short film, "Sunshower."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:23 PM on October 25, 2018

I really enjoyed this film, but it's been a while. Thanks for reminding it's time for a rewatch.
posted by miss-lapin at 9:01 PM on October 25, 2018

The growly zombies were a bit meh, but I loved the tension and atmosphere of the build-up, and I absolutely loved that the movie takes a last-minute swerve on the question of what magic is, what it's for, and whether it works.

My favorite small touches were the lines about the distantly barking dog and the moments where she takes comfort from the sound of her son's voice, knowing it is a mocking demon.
posted by Scattercat at 7:04 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just rewatched this and it is still amazing.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:38 PM on July 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

I watched this for the first time over the long weekend, and I so loved the choice to build the movie around the Abramelin ritual, and to have it be this grueling, claustrophobic thing that didn't lead to any flashy magic. What an excellent frame for a story. You could certainly get many more lurid, obvious horror movies out of such a ritual, but I'd be pretty damned thrilled by a whole subgenre of Abramelin ritual movies that kept it psychological and tense, or surreal and psychedelic, or made it even more of a ghost story, or went with a bildungsroman...anything, really.

That said, while I had a pretty immediate psychological understanding of the movie's resolution and ending, I had very little spiritual/religious understanding of it what with not being Christian, and had to have a friend who was raised Catholic explain the religious/spiritual nuances to me.

But then the muddy creeps were a let down. And after repeated mentions of how tragic it would be if a certain law of magic was trespassed upon, once it occurs the film seemed to suggest something incredible and terrifying had happened, but then it backed away to a much warmer ending.

I mean, I think something incredible and terrifying did happen! Solomon died because he fucked up the ritual. Yes, he died of an infection, but given that the magic legit worked, I think the takeaway here is that his death was certainly the result of his own failures at the ritual. Part of the tension of the movie is whether the magic is real at all, whether Solomon is just a scammer. By the end, I think we're meant to unambiguously believe the magic is in fact real, and thus Solomon's death isn't just bad luck and bad choices, but his moral desert and his failure at the ritual. Also, Solomon said they'd be stuck there if they broke the salt circle, and that's exactly what happened to Sophia: her car didn't work, she walked and walked and ended up right back where she started, and then she got dragged to hell, or something like it. It was only when she asked for mercy and forgiveness that she was saved.
posted by yasaman at 3:03 PM on July 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

I loved the first 3/4 of it. And the last two minutes.

An almost-never-seen grinding approach to the occult. No Constantine flashy 'zip zop' magic guy. A slow, plodding, methodical, pedestrian weirdo that feels very real and very pragmatic. Creeping dread. Uncertainty and looping around the question of whether it's working, what's happening, what's summoning, if maybe the whole thing is real or if this woman and Louis UK (hey, he's British and beats off in front of women without consent) are just driving themselves crazy through isolation and a poor diet.

Then things go really wrong, Louis UK dies, there's the "runaway loop" trope where she ends up back at the house.

Then she gets brought to the basement by Dirtbag Cenobites.

The whole 'reveal' that the terrible forces beyond our ken just look like people who followed the Dead way too long, and torment of the damned is sitting in a basement while somebody goes at your fingy with a pair of pliers -- and you can get out of it by being really really sorry -- sorry, that just destroyed it. Retroactively ruint all the goodwill it had accrued.

And then there's an angel, who looks cool! And she opts for personal growth! Nice!

But as I said to Kitteh, spending eighty thousand pounds and losing a year of your life and kinda killing a dude -- you could have gone to therapy, lady.

Pre-ending, my big question is "if you can wish for anything in the universe, and you have a dead son who died horribly, wouldn't I want that not to have happened be higher on the list than revenge?"

Four-course meal; great apps, great main, giant turd painted to look vaguely like a Swiss Roll for dessert, then a l'il mint afterward. I'm not saying the other three courses weren't great, but man, that dessert really colours the meal.

(and for what it's worth, I thought the whole thing went catawonky because after he Louis UK'd her she peed in his soup; he was 'contaminated' and no longer pure, so the knife wound went septic, etc. etc.)
posted by Shepherd at 4:37 PM on October 10, 2024 [1 favorite]