A Dark Song: The Great Work

There are a couple of books I remember from my adolescence - Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish. They’re basically the story of what happens when an arms dealer contracts a black magician to perform a ritual that sets loose the whole host of Hell upon Earth for a single day (spoilers: it does not…go well). I haven’t read them in years, but what struck me at the time and stayed with ever since was their treatment of the occult.

See, in most popular media, depictions of the occult usually boil down to candles, pentagrams, robes, and maybe a naked woman if it’s going for extra-lurid. And sometimes this works - I have kind of a soft spot especially for music that runs with that kind of grindhouse Satanic aesthetic - but as a representation of occult tradition and practice, it’s shallow and limited. It’s effective as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all that far. The occult (what little I know about it) isn’t just candles and pentagrams and chanting; it’s scholarship, it’s devotion, it’s discipline. It’s a practice as deep and involved as the sciences or arts with which it commingles. Those books by Blish were the first time I saw black magic depicted as an actual practice, with underlying principles, systems and vocabulary. They felt like a glimpse into a larger world.

A Dark Song is an equally serious take on magic, as well as an understated, solemn examination of the costs exerted by a long and difficult journey.

The film opens with a quote from the book of Psalms -“For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” - before introducing us to Sophia. She’s touring a large house in the Welsh countryside that she’s interested in renting for an extended period of time. It’s very important that some of the rooms face east or west, and she’s willing to pay up-front to rent it for a year, and to pay extra for the agent's discretion.

Having secured the house, Sophia shows it to a man named Joseph Solomon. Mr. Solomon has made the trip from London to take a look at the house with Sophia. He hasn’t agreed to anything yet, and he’s testing Sophia, trying to see if she’s lying about her intentions.

As it transpires, Joseph Solomon is a magician, and Sophia wants his help to perform the Abramelin operation, a grueling year-plus process that, if successful, will put Sophia into conversation with the angel set to watch over her, to ask that angel for a specific favor. But to summon angels, one must first invoke demons and bind them, to constrain their influence upon the petitioner.

In Solomon’s words, they will unshackle this house from reality, and things both light and dark will find their way in.

The majority of the film is the ritual, investing it with depth and depicting it as the ordeal it is. This isn’t some candles, symbols and chanting, this is months of preparation - fasting, total abstinence, study in multiple languages of symbols and systems, grueling rites undertaken multiple times to purge Sophia spiritually and physically. Each room in the house serves a different function in the ritual, they are moved through systematically, consecrated to specific purposes. This will take the better part of a year, spent in total isolation. The entire house is ringed with salt, to cut it free from the world. Solomon is equal parts priest, drill sergeant, and dominant, and there’s a constant undercurrent of ordeal as a path to transcendence and purification throughout.

And this leads to the effect these conditions are going to have. These are two people completely shut into a big house in the middle of nowhere for several months, pushing themselves to the limit physically and psychologically. Naturally, the cracks are going to show eventually - Sophia is impatient for results, and as it transpires, she hasn’t been completely honest with Solomon about her intentions. Solomon is both exacting and damaged. He has seen some shit, and begins the process by detoxing from the alcohol he relies on to “deal with the horror.” He insists on adherence to ritual, to protocol, to practice at every step, and his reaction to Sophia’s dissembling is interesting - it isn’t as much one of anger or betrayal as frustration and fear. Intent and drive are critical for the ritual to work, he explains, and any falsity of purpose corrupts it. It is the reaction you would expect from a nuclear engineer who watches someone mishandle a fuel rod. But ultimately, for all his knowledge and desire to keep himself and Sophia safe with a minimum of moral judgment, Solomon himself is just a man, broken and traumatized. So human frailty in multiple forms conspire to corrupt the ritual, and when the cracks open up, things from outside of our world begin to creep in.

Like a lot of the stuff I’ve been reviewing lately, this one’s best described as “stately” - it relies on lots of long quiet moments suddenly interrupted, wide shots of landscapes dominated by looming clouds and very small figures moving across them. The score is largely cello, percussion and some chimes employed to great effect throughout. It’s not as impeccably shot as, say, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House or Hereditary, but it’s generally well-composed and well-acted, and generally gets over on its pace, its focus on the two characters, and the way at every turn the gravity of their situation is impressed upon us. It’s very much a slow burn - the first act is largely about preparing the ritual, the second is occupied with interpersonal tension, and things don’t really kick off in a big way until the very end. It’s initially very small things that seem to suggest greater forces at work, and then things get a little weirder, then a little weirder, and then things really start going bad. This isn’t a film occupied with hysterics or running around screaming - Sophia may not always be honest about her intent, but her drive is never in doubt - as much as it is the slow realization of a first-time drug trip. The shit’s not working until it is, and then, well, strap in.

It drags a little toward the back half - there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Sophia and Joseph that starts to feel repetitive, and there’s a bit toward the end, just before it gets really weird that should pay off a really important part from earlier and doesn’t, but what’s interesting is where it all ends up pointing. This isn’t a film satisfied with glib clichés about messing with powers beyond your control, and so it ends up delivering in ways that aren’t always obvious or spelled-out, ending in a way that isn’t necessarily what you’d expect going in, but makes perfect sense. It’s a really weird set of comparisons to make, but this film strikes me as kind of a mix of Martyrs (albeit much less graphically violent), The Babadook, and The Trip, and to me that’s an interesting intersection for a film to stake out. Rituals and ordeals are transformative work, and that’s the point finally and elegantly made here.

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