Dark Skies - Light Scares

A successful horror movie is difficult to crack these days. In an age when audiences are desensitized to the severing of a head here and a casual dismemberment there, it really does take something a cut above the rest to make you require the need for a water-proof seat at the cinema. Therefore I was slightly optimistic for a truly terrifying experience when I saw Dark Skies yesterday. Marketed very much as a film well placed in the horror genre, with the creative team behind such scare-fests as Insidious and Sinister, I thought a straight-out horror was what we would get. However, I was wrong.

The film tells of the Barrett family, headed by Lacy and Daniel (Keri Washington and Josh Hamilton), a property agent and an unemployed architect. The lives of this seemingly idyllic, all-American family soon takes a turn for the worse when the family starts to begin to be plagued by a seemingly untraceable intruder in their home. Things begin quite timidly, things in the kitchen being rearranged or photographs going missing. However, with each visit from this mysterious intruder things begin to escalate when the Barrett's two sons begin to peak the intruder's interest. What results is a semi-tense series of incidents that are yes, eerie but not entirely original. Reaching breaking point the family's matriarch Lacy does some digging and discovers that her family is not the first to have experienced such happenings. This leads her and Daniel to Edwin Pollard (played by the wonderful J. K. Simmons), apparently an expert on what the family is experiencing. Without divulging the source of the Barretts' terror, this is where the movie slides out of the horror genre in which we have been led to believe it is so firmly placed. Despite elevating the story ever so slightly out of the confines of a formulaic modern-day horror film, it is detrimental to the film in the sense that the audience do not get the film in which they were expecting. What we get instead is a film that does have some thrills and chills but owes more to the classics of science fiction rather than horror. The film is heavily influenced by M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 classic Signs, even so far as having a round the table family walk down memory lane before the film's climax. With influences of Signs and even Hitchcock's The Birds (obvious from the poster) - which Signs itself was inspired by - the film feels very much like a younger, less talented brother trying to emulate the achievements of his much older and intellectually superior sibling.

The family structure even mirrors that of Mel Gibson's in Signs. There's the slightly annoying yet endearing five year old, a sickly older sibling and the two parental figures, one initially refusing to believe what's happening around them but won round in the end. Keri Russell gives a strong performance as Lacy Barrett whose balance between worried mother and familial matriarch is well played. The acting prowess however, comes from veteran of the Spider-man trilogy, J. K. Simmons. With scenes amounting to probably less than ten minutes Simmons still manages to steal the show as the obsessive hermit with all the answers to the Barretts' questions. Aside from Simmons and Russell there are no other performances that light up the screen which is partly down to the film. Formulaic in the majority, the characters feel more like constructs assigned to tick the box of a certain criteria rather than individual and complex individuals.

So, would I recommend Dark Skies? Well, yes I would - with a few reservations! The film isn't Lawrence of Arabia, nor is it Rosemary's Baby. What it is a slightly above average chilling film with a few scares thrown in. Wrongly marketed as an out and out horror just be aware that that is not what you will get. If you're after pure and unadulterated horror, then my advice is this - wait a couple of weeks and see the remake of Sam Raimi's 80s classic Evil Dead - or even the upcoming film The Conjuring, shown as a trailer before Dark Skies and was probably more frightening in two minutes than Dark Skies was in ninety!