PLOT: Years after her sister disappeared at Arvores National Park, a young woman named Lennon gets a job as an Arvores park ranger in hopes of finding out what happened to her sibling. Unfortunately for her, she does find out.
REVIEW: Teresa Sutherland wrote the screenplay for Emma Tammi’s 2018 horror Western The Wind and was part of the writing staff on the Mike Flanagan series Midnight Mass, and now she has made her feature directorial debut with the horror film Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which she was inspired to make after hearing “real-life conspiracy theories surrounding the unusually high number of unsolved missing person cases that happen in national parks and forests”. She came up with a theory of her own… something dealing with an ancient supernatural force that still operates in these isolated places “where it still gets dark”… and delivered it in the form of a movie that has some interesting ideas, but doesn’t make for a very satisfying viewing experience.
Georgina Campbell, whose breakthrough role in the genre hit Barbarian (not to mention a BAFTA win for Murdered by My Boyfriend) has led to her landing roles in things like Bird Box Barcelona and an upcoming film directed by a Shyamalan daughter, stars in Lovely, Dark, and Deep as a young woman named Lennon, who has taken a job as a ranger at the Arvores National Park with an ulterior motive: when she was a child, her sister Jenny went missing in this park, and she intends to scour the land in hopes of figuring out what exactly happened to her sibling. When a ranger stationed in a remote location disappears, leaving behind only a note where he said he owes the land a body, Lennon gets the chance to replace him for 90 days, which she’s going to spend searching through the back country. One of the podcasts Lennon listens to at a couple different points in the movie informs us that Arvores National Park has the highest number of missing persons cases out of any place in the world, which certainly deepens the mystery she’s trying to solve. It’s an interesting set-up, and Campbell was a strong choice for the lead. She has the acting skills and the screen presence to carry the entire film on her shoulders, which is very important since she’s the only person on screen for long stretches of it.
While Campbell does a great job with the material she was given to work with, she was let down by the script a bit, as we don’t really get to know Lennon as a person. We know she’s deeply traumatized by the disappearance of her sister, she’s quiet and has such high anxiety that she’ll chew her fingernails until her fingers bleed, but I don’t feel that I know much about her beyond that. There’s nothing to go by other than her drive to find missing people.
Sutherland took the slow burn approach with this one, so we end up spending a lot of time watching Lennon quietly make her way around the forest, going about her ranger duties. This sort of build-up needs to lead to a great pay-off to be worth the time spent on it… but the movie doesn’t have that. Instead, there comes a point where it goes completely off the rails, with Lennon slipping into some different plain of existence where she’s just bombarded with trippy visuals for a stretch of 40 minutes or so. This part of the film will still work for some viewers who are more inclined to go along for the ride with something like this, but for me there are few things more irritating than when a movie turns into nothing but scene after scene of a character just bumbling their way through nightmares. Especially when there’s no Freddy Krueger around to liven things up.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is not something I’ll ever want to watch again, but the writer/director does show promise with it. As mentioned, there are interesting ideas in the story, they just didn’t come together in a way I found to be satisfying. The concept of this film would have worked very well for a short film, but there’s not enough substance here to sustain the feature running time. Padded out beyond reason, the movie’s 87 minutes eventually start to feel interminable. When we reach the end, the destination wasn’t worth the journey, because things kind of just sputter out. But even when it’s frustrating to watch, which is for a large percentage of the time, it’s still a nice movie to look at, as Sutherland and cinematographer Rui Poças were able to capture some great images of the forest where it all takes place. (The story is set in the United States, but the filming location was Portugal.)
So we have intriguing ideas, a good lead actress, and nice cinematography, yet the movie still falls short. I think Sutherland could make an effective horror movie at some point, but Lovely, Dark, and Deep just didn’t work for me.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is set to receive a VOD release on February 22nd.
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