Dark Touch: Won’t Someone Think Of The Children?

It’s a time-honored technique: If you want to really freak people out, bring children into the picture. Put them in danger, put them in pain, or better yet, make them the antagonist. Nothing like a good creepy child to add value to a scary movie. Hell, we don’t even need to be talking about horror films - if you want to whip up some good old-fashioned moral panic, simply suggest that some type of film or music or literature or whatever will be dangerous for our children. The amount of self-righteous, authoritarian nonsense that gets pushed for the sake of “the children” is considerable. And that’s because it works - who wants to be the person who opposes child safety? Nobody, that’s who.

But this week isn’t really about moral panic. It’s about Dark Touch, an unsubtle exercise in formulaic nastiness that pretends to something more and fails.

It opens with sort of a false start - it’s late at night, raining, and a little girl runs out of her family’s house. She’s found outside, taken in by another family, and then her parents come to retrieve her. There’s some tense, oblique conversation, something goes unspoken and then…it’s a few years later? What was the point of that? I know I usually deride flashbacks for neatly underlining that a particular place or person is bad, and no shit, we’re watching a horror film, you don’t need to tell us bad shit is coming, but this…doesn’t even do that. It’s just a scene where a little girl runs out of her house and then gets brought back.

And then we cut to this little girl, a few years older, with her family. Her name is Niamh, and she and her family live in a small town in Ireland, far away from the big city. It’s her, her mother and father, and her infant brother. But it’s also here that the puzzling opening scene starts to make a little more sense. It’s the old story - a prosperous, middle-class family, nice house, cute kids, but when night falls, father goes into Niamh’s bedroom and locks the door. No wonder she runs away. And then, one night, it all goes wrong. Niamh screams at the top of her lungs, and the house rattles, objects shift. By the time it’s all over, Niamh’s parents are dead, crushed beneath heavy furniture, and the police find Niamh hiding in a cupboard. She clutched her brother so tight it suffocated him.

So, traumatized, Niamh is placed in the care of her neighbors, Lucas and Natalie. They have two children of their own and the memory of a daughter lost to cancer. It’s just until they get more permanent accommodations set up. This way she can keep going to school while the police look for the gang of vandals that obviously tore up her family’s house. And it all seems nice enough, initially, until one night when Lucas reaches for his belt in response to an errant child…

…and the house starts to rattle, and objects start to shift.

It is clear almost from jump where this movie is going. It’s weird that it tries to pretend at all to be anything other than what it obviously is, as if it’s as much in denial as the adults that populate the film. This is a story about a traumatized girl who can move things with her mind, set against a backdrop of pervasive child abuse. From the opening scene, this is a film crawling with children - infants, toddlers, pre-teens - in almost every scene. This is a small town with a lot of kids, and it becomes pretty clear that a lot of these kids are getting beaten or molested and that nobody talks about it. And now one of them has supernatural powers. So it’s also pretty clear that this isn’t about survival, it’s about revenge.

So no, there’s no mystery here - not in the soundtrack, which fills most of the space in the film with minor-key piano or buzzing ambience or swells, all intended to communicate that this is very sinister and spooky. It’s not a film that is content to let moments be. Nor is there any mystery in the basic narrative - it’s clear very early on exactly what has happened and who’s responsible no matter how much the characters in the film look the other way. What we’re left with offers no revelation, no actual horror. There’s nothing to discover, it’s very clear pretty early on exactly what’s going to happen, so there’s no tension - it’s just a matter of watching everything play out and wondering how far they’re going to push it. And as the film goes on, everything feels less and less grounded in plausibility (and the contrast between the very ugly reality of child abuse and supernatural powers makes the whole thing feel trivialized) and more and more like an excuse to do shocking things.

The film itself is equally obvious. The cinematography leans heavily into shadowy interiors and dark exteriors with few sources of external light, and the dialogue is extremely stilted and expository throughout. Combined with the intrusive soundtrack, it all has a real movie-of-the-week feel, where absolutely nothing is left to mood or inference that can’t be spelled out in the most obvious way. It does succeed to some degree early on in creating a very oppressive atmosphere by emphasizing abuse’s many forms and making it almost omnipresent, but it doesn’t last - as the movie goes on it becomes less interested in the cost of violence against children or the very real horror associated with it, and more and more interested in a supernatural riff on the “bad seed” film that uses the very serious topic of child abuse as a rationalization for violence, and that feels kind of gross to me.

It’s not that I have a problem with provocative or transgressive filmmaking in horror, far from it. But in my opinion, if you’re going to traffic in subject matter closer to taboos, you need to earn it. You need to treat the characters with a certain amount of respect, treat the topic with the gravity it deserves, and this film just doesn’t. Instead of locating the horror in the experience of victims of abuse, it ultimately uses that abuse merely as justification for everything that comes afterward. The humanity of its protagonists and antagonists alike gets lost along the way, ultimately discarded in favor of empty, escalating atrocity. It feels less like an articulation of trauma, or even of a small community’s complacency in the things going on behind closed doors, and more like an attempt to shock by pivoting all of the violence around children - either as the victims or the perpetrators - without ever really reckoning with (or even tapping into) the impact that either of those things actually has. It’s like I said, if what you’re bringing to the party is a load of bullshit, just bring up “the children” and hell, maybe that will get you over.

IMDB entry
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