It was one of those days that I was actively looking for something bad. Things had been going a little too well lately (as in I've liked everything I've seen) - so it was time to watch something terrible. So off to Amazon Prime. I know that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of their service, but it is why I kind of love it. After cruising through their horror section, I came across Dark Souls - the picture had a girl's face looking up at a drill bit.
Okay, needlessly gruesome box art? Check.
The description: "The hit horror film! A young girl is attacked and left for dead. When the police calls the girl's father to identify his daughters body, he tells them that she has just walked in the door. But there's something seriously wrong with her." Confusing grammar ("police calls") and overhyping? Check.
I checked out the info. Date of 2014, supposedly a hit, and I've never heard of it? Check. I felt confident that this would be bad.
Well, my expectations were shattered once I fired it up. The first things up were names of all of the film festivals it had been a part of in 2010. Then, once the credits roll, I started to see very foreign sounding names. So the fact that it was Norwegian would account for me not hearing about. So I was "disappointed" probably wasn't going to crappy. And for most of the run time, Dark Souls is pretty good. There are some silly things that make it fall short of a recommendation, but the big ideas are there and overall execution is solid.
Our young girl from the synopsis is actually in her early twenties, I would guess. Johanna is out for a run in the woods when she is attacked by a man in an orange jumpsuit, cheap face mask, and a drill. True to the box art, after a brief chase he drills into her head with a power drill. (Certainly a gross idea, but we don't really see it - this is a movie full of gross ideas, but it generally backs away from showing anything super gruesome.) The cops show up, verify she's dead, and take her away in a body bag. But at the morgue, she mysteriously awakens and shambles back to her house. (Somehow avoiding detection anywhere along the way - the first sign of Dark Souls ignoring basic logic.) Her father Morten Ravn (just referred to as Ravn for most of the the film) takes a call from the police with the bad news, but he's not convinced because she just came home and is just sitting in front of her computer, like all the kids these days.
But after a few hours Ravn notices something is wrong with his daughter - she is nearly catatonic, and other than the words "help me" written over and over again on her computer, she is showing no signs of outward consciousness. She can shamble around, zombie-like, but that's about it. She goes through a series of tests at the hospital, but they cannot figure out what is going on. Johanna is not violent and doesn't exhibit any signs of instability - she is just mostly catatonic and occasionally throws up some black goo. Ravn decides it is in his daughters best interest for her to come home with him.
Flash forward 30 days - there have been more attacks all across Europe, and the hospital has an entire wing dedicated to treating these patients/victims. Ravn is tired of the inept cops inability to solve the case, and starts looking for answers himself. You know he's obsessed because he's got a room full of maps, newspaper clippings, pushpins, and strings all connected to each other. What he stumbles on is more that just some crazy guy in a jump suit...
As a foreign film (made in Norway in 2010), it was interesting to me to notice some of the differences between this and a similar movie that would have been made here in the good ol' USA. First off, Ravn is not a typical leading man. He's certainly a good actor, but is a little more on the older/doughy side - he looks like he may get winded heading up a set of stairs. He's not your average horror/action hero, so it brings a unique perspective to things - you get the idea that he's out looking for answers rather than revenge.
There is also a bit where the virus is explained to somehow tie in with Norway's oil industry - i.e. something terrible came up from the depths of their deep-sea drilling. This information is delivered from a former diver who is now homeless, who goes into the whole "everyone in this country got rich off of the hard work of people like me..." I feel like this "oil-guilt" isn't really touched in American cinema. (There Will be Blood, I guess, but that's far enough in the past that we can distance ourselves from it.) I guess you don't bite the hand that feeds you...
But the most jarring is when Ravn is on the trail of an orange jump-suited maniac who clearly presents a threat to him. He follows the man into an abandoned building armed with... a camera. There is no way an American movie dude is going into this situation with anything less than one gun, maybe more. It was just a striking reminder of how prevalent guns are in our culture.
The overall concept of Dark Souls is really pretty cool. It's hard to go into without totally spoiling things. But it sort of plays out like a precursor to any number of zombie/virus/post-apocalyptic films. It's well made, has a decent central mystery, and is different enough to be appealing for most of it's running time.
But while the big ideas are really cool, a lot of the smaller things don't work. For instance, Ravn (who as I've said isn't really action hero material) dispatches his foes in a number of really stupid ways, like just ducking and letting them drill into each other. It almost seems like a cartoon at times. We've seen these guys go after a number of people and drill into their heads - they're obviously very fit and agile. So the fact that they can't catch one middle-aged man just really tested the movies credibility. I think there are ways to make deaths like that work, but it's just not well shot here. At all.
Ultimately, it's the big downfall of the film. The big action sequence leading up to the (not very revealing) reveal is so poorly done and so full of amazing coincidences (for Ravn) and villainous nitwits (for Ravn to outwit) that it erases much of the goodwill it's earned up to that point. I get that they wanted a big set-piece to end the movie, but I wish they had gone in a more low-key direction. Because what we get just leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
Overall, Dark Souls was mostly enjoyable, but falls just short of a recommendation. It really shows the importance of ending on a high note. Definitely takes the title of best use of black vomit though. (sorry Rigor Mortis and Dark Mountain).
Overall, I would hesitate to recommend this film.
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