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In Darkness review: Natalie Dormer goes Atomic Bland in a vacuous conspiracy thriller

Natalie Dormer in In Darkness - David R. Gaynes
Natalie Dormer in In Darkness - David R. Gaynes

Dir: Anthony Byrne. Cast: Natalie Dormer, Ed Skrein, Neil Maskell, Emily Ratajkowski, Joely Richardson, James Cosmo. 15 cert, 101 mins

With its pushy blue and pink filters, and a sightless heroine played by Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer, the British potboiler In Darkness has a very specific game in mind: it wants to convert Atomic Blonde into Atomic Blind.

A fabulously successful pianist who spends her days in recording studios laying down tracks for horror scores, Dormer’s Sofia becomes embroiled in a political conspiracy when her hot mess of a neighbour (Emily Ratajkowski) is defenestrated somewhere in chintzy West London.

The opening phases of the film, co-written and directed by Dormer’s partner, Anthony Byrne, showily call to mind everything from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) to all the blind-women-in-peril thrillers you could mention: Dormer’s Sofia follows in direct line from Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967) through Mia Farrow in See No Evil (1971) and Madeleine Stowe as a terrified violinist in Blink (1993).

Every one of those was massively superior: Byrne’s idea of ringing some changes in this admittedly hoary arena is to fling all credibility out of that upstairs window, contriving a plot which makes less sense and generates less suspense with every successive turn.

Sofia, we’re fairly sure, knows more than she’s admitting, at least to the salt-of-the-earth detective played by Neil Maskell, whose expressions of confusion become unintentionally funny as the subplots, kidnappings and shards of backdrop pile up.

Everything has to do with the dead girl’s father (Jan Bijvoet), a Serbian war criminal hiding from justice, whose fate depends on a USB dongle which the whole world – including brother-and-sister spies essayed with bitchy looks by Ed Skrein and Joely Richardson – wants located. As to where this tacky Macguffin might be and what’s on it, Ratajkowski, who spends about half of her performance turning grey on a mortuary slab, might not be the first person to ask.

Dormer’s resilient screen presence isn’t the problem, even as she expends misplaced faith in a role that needn’t have been anywhere near this daft. One late-breaking twist is the kind of gotcha howler that leaves an entire audience feeling duped for no intelligible reason. Not delightfully tasteful, either, is the flashback gimmickry involving raped Bosnian war orphans, in the context of this wholly opportunistic thriller format. 

As an exercise in style, which is all it has left to rely on, the film is flashy and vacuous at once, paying more attention to its night-cool photography than such fripperies as basic continuity, and bogging itself down with long, chatty, tension-free encounters Charlize Theron wouldn’t have tolerated for five deathly seconds. It’s incorrigibly silly by the end, but also dull: Atomic Bland, more like.