A couple of weeks ago I started my litany of disappointment at the film Temple by pointing out how sometimes a film can look really generic but be really good (which Temple was not), and I find myself sort of coming back to that book/cover relationship when I think about the film Darling, which I had typed into a list I keep of movies to check out and then promptly forgotten about. It’s described as a film about a lonely young woman’s descent into madness, and the thumbnail art is pure 1960s - a black and white illustration of a young woman screaming in front of a hot pink pop-art spiral. It screamed “hey, I was made by someone who has probably watched Repulsion a lot.” And I’m into that, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Turns out this is one of those times when the film does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s tense and unsettling, strongly reminiscent of Repulsion without being a complete rehash or overly-faithful homage.
There’s a young woman, she’s never named, and she’s apparently just taken over as the caretaker of a very old, historic home in the middle of New York City. An older woman, obviously wealthy, is handing her the keys and telling her not to worry at all about the house’s reputation and how, well, she shouldn’t be telling her this, but the last caretaker apparently threw herself off the upstairs balcony. No, I’m pretty sure you shouldn't be telling her that, but here we are. She’s going to love it, it’s a beautiful old house, please don’t hesitate to call, even just to say hello, et cetera. And so the day passes, and the young woman explores the house, finds her quarters, the bathroom, the kitchen…
…a door at the end of a long hallway that will not open. A crucifix necklace in a drawer, the crucifix inverted. She has terrible dreams that night, her face contorted into silent screams. Visions of throwing herself over the balcony.
It’s not really clear what’s going on with the young woman. The house does feel faintly sinister, and there are stories of rituals, conjurations conducted within the house, and she’s having these terrible nightmares. But a chance encounter with a man on the street also sends her into a fit of panic, and she’s scarred physically as well as mentally. Is it the house? Is it something inside her head? Again, it’s all reminiscent of Repulsion, the story of a woman who, isolated in her apartment following a trauma, slowly goes mad. The young woman seems to be working really hard to keep herself together, and she does venture outside the house, but at night the nightmares always come back, as likely evidence of a malign presence as of her own instability. Her perspective is the only one we have, and it’s definitely possible that we’re not getting the whole story (certainly in the case of the harrowing second act).The film doesn’t really commit to one explanation or the other and stays ambiguous for most of its runtime, trafficking in deep unease whatever the source and letting the viewer draw their own conclusions.
This is a film that is more felt and experienced than thought about. It’s not an especially complicated story and there’s little to no character work (with the exception of an important revelation) done over the course of the film. It relies almost entirely on tone and atmosphere. But it does a really, really good job of establishing that tone and atmosphere. It’s shot in black and white in a fairly square aspect ratio, and this both gives it a timeless feel and creates a slight sense of claustrophobia. The frame keeps the young woman squarely hemmed in. Between the film stock and how everyone dresses and talks, it’s easy to pin this film at occurring sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s, but it’s not overly precious about this, and the end result is more a film out of time than one attempting to emulate a specific era, much like The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Shots are very well-composed throughout, with the framing doing a lot of work to give even empty spaces a sinister feeling, by putting something right in the middle of the frame, drawing your eye toward it, and then suddenly interrupting those relatively static shots with strobelike bursts of imagery. The end result is unnerving and means that this is not a film for the seizure-prone.
It also gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposition. The sound design doesn’t really rely on much of a musical score, the most frequent sounds being a ticking clock and ringing phone, with specific songs used to underscore a scene, but that means the music that does occur can be as startling and intrusive as the imagery it accompanies, including frequent use of shrieking strings over static shots of empty rooms or close-ups on placid faces. Long silences punctuated by sudden, sharp sounds. As things begin to escalate, there is the repeated combination and recombination of images, the repetition giving us the feeling that something is coming. We don’t know what, but it isn’t good. There is also the very occasional jump scare, but they’re rarely gratuitous and expertly timed when they do occur. I keep thinking of this film in terms of its rhythm, the way it plays with tension and release. It’s not afraid to cut away quickly, or leave something unseen, but it’s also equally unafraid to linger, maybe even a little longer than you’d think, to create a different kind of tension and discomfort
That all said, like a lot of horror films, it does drop the ball a little in the home stretch. Through most of the film it does a really good job of leaving things to our imagination or suggesting things indirectly, it does get a little too trite and overly expository toward the very end. For that matter, “young woman goes mad as a response to trauma,” which is certainly one of the possible narratives here, feels maybe a little offensive to modern sensibilities, but at the very least is sort of a cliché at best by this point. It’s obvious. It’s been done before. I’m not sure this film really transcended cliché on that front, but it doesn’t detract from the rest of the film, which uses style and atmosphere to great effect. It’s made in a dated style, both in terms of how it’s filmed and what kind of story it is. That said, it’s still a very well-crafted experience for the most part, and if you can look past the casual sexism of the premise, there’s a lot to like.
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