Out of Darkness

Now, I had never heard about this 2022 movie titled "Out Of Darkness" prior to sitting down to watch it. But I have to admit that the movie's cover and the movie's synopsis definitely was interesting enough to make me stop and take notice. And without knowing what I was getting myself into, then director Andrew Cumming had every opportunity to impress and entertain me with "Out Of Darkness". The storyline, as written by Ruth Greenberg, Andrew Cumming and Oliver Kassman, proved to be somewhat bland and stale. There wasn't really a whole lot going on, and most of the movie was just the audience watching the group of people stumbling around the hostile environment, mostly in the dark, trying not to wet themselves because of the sounds of some unseen creature lurking about in the darkness. Or watching them stumble about the forest in the daytime. This might have worked well for a horror movie in the 1980s, but not so much in 2022. I found the narrative in the movie to be a swing and a miss, and it was definitely a movie that was progressively getting more and more difficult to keep an interest in watching. While I was not familiar with any of the members of the cast, I have to say that it definitely was something I liked about the movie. Just a shame that the cast had to little to work with in terms of script, storyline, characters and narrative. Something which I did like about "Out of Darkness", was the language that they used in the movie. It added a nice touch to the atmosphere of the overall impression. This is not a movie that I would recommend you to rush out and get to watch. The movie had a promising synopsis, sure, but director Andrew Cumming just didn't deliver an outstanding movie here. And I can in all honesty say that I am never returning to watch "Out of Darkness" a second time. My rating of "Out of Darkness" lands on a three out of ten stars.

This movie depends on almost endless scenes of its six stone age characters running through scrubby open terrain and dark forests, with whip pans and intercut close-ups of terrified faces, to create a sense of danger and unseen horror. Trouble is, this obvious packing of the narrative with ginned-up suspense achieves nothing in terms of drama or horror. Added to that are a lot of unanswered questions about character motivation and the plausibility of the so-called demons tracking our hapless sextet. The inevitable "reveal" is both laughable and inexplicable. I truly appreciate the attempt by the filmmakers to create a low-budget feature out of spare elements and a minimalist sensibility, but at times I felt insulted that this movie expected to get away with what was clearly a woefully under-imagined scenario.