A Dark Song - B-

​Quick Hit: Dark and twisty inside, but fumbles the ending a bit.

When setting up the schedule for the month, you would think that I would have planned throwing this up directly after the occult wickedness of Pyewacket. However, it was a delightfully black accident. Today we feature another movie about this occult, but this one is much more drawn out, and there isn’t a simple spell to get what needs to be done. Today’s film is Liam Gavin’s directorial debut A Dark Song.

A Dark Song follows Sophia (Catherine Walker), who has lost her child. She wants to contact him so she pays Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram) a ridiculous sum of money to walk her through the complicated occult ritual to summon her guardian angel. This involves cleansing her spiritually, as well as physically, and staying in the same house for weeks on end without leaving. This also involves several scenes of near torture, that seem very near to waterboarding and other heinous acts.

The best experience that A Dark Song can give you is that you don’t quite know whether Solomon is legitimate or not. He comes across as extremely shady, and as the film progresses you start to doubt him, as does Sophia. This comes to point in the center of the film where you absolutely believe that he is full of it, and that he has simply taken advantage of this woman for weeks. But though that sounds like a perfectly good plot for a horror movie, that isn’t what happens here. Eventually, the tables turn, and we begin to experience things with Sophia. Dark things that involve death and evil. 

I really liked a lot of the ritual scenes, because they really showed the devotion that these the characters would have to have in order to go through with such an experience. I’m not sure how much of this was based on research vs. just a general idea of the practice, but it was beautiful attention to set detail. I also thought that the script was pretty well-done, up until the end, and that Gavin was extremely confident with his camera. There are very few moments where he shies away from anything, and it helps us to have this realism when things start to go bump in the night. Otherwise, would we even believe them?

I’m going to throw up a spoiler alert here because I want to touch on the ending.

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Ok, so let’s talk about the ending. I’ll at least partially exclude the fact that the angel was pretty obvious CGI – I guess an ethereal angel could indeed have a different look then everyone else around it. But the whole idea of her just learning to forgive and the angel being cool with that? I guess it’s a good moral – forgiveness is great – but it did feel like a bit of a letdown after watching the build-up for all this time. Particularly when the evil never really gets shown in any real way outside of some zombie-like creatures. I just felt like the directors could have done a lot more with this moment, and it comes off as feeling like they ran out of ideas or budget and just needed it to end. 

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So in the end, I thought like A Dark Song was pretty good, but the ending left me wanting quite a bit. Because of that, I’m giving it a “B-“.   

For more on this film, check out IMDB.