Dark Touch, 2014.
Directed by Marina de Van.
Starring Missy Keating, Marcella Plunkett, Padraic Delaney, Richard Dormer and Charlotte Flyvholm.
SYNOPSIS:
A young girl witnesses the death of her parents when the furniture in their house starts moving around all on its own but in the aftermath nobody believes her.
In the opening scenes of French/Irish/Swedish psychological chiller Dark Touch we get to see the parents of eleven-year-old Niamh (Missy Keating) get brutally murdered when what appears like some sort of poltergeist attack slams furniture into her father and impales her mother. It’s quite a well staged scene and keeps you gripped as the innocent young girl sees her parents killed but it’s also very derivative of scenes from Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, Carrie or any number of supernatural stories you care to mention and it’s also as good as this film gets.
What follows is an allegory about child abuse and the effects of it on the child involved, and while that is obviously a serious subject the film never actually delivers a message other than what we already know. Of course, we know where the source of the energies moving things around is coming from and once that is established – very early on so there’s no mystery involved – the film doesn’t really have anywhere to go other than the obvious route of Niamh being taken in by another family and more furniture gets moved around. A scene where an abusive mother is punished for the merciless beatings she dishes out to her children is the only other setpiece that had possibilites but is dealt with in such a cold manner that you don’t really care about either party involved, and that’s pretty much how the rest of the film plays out.
Dark Touch is a very uneven and unoriginal film that seems to have a lot it wants to say but doesn’t quite know how to get it out in a way that isn’t ham-fisted or just plain boring. A mood is established very early on and the film never deviates from the gloom that it so readily wallows in, which adds to the effect of what’s happpening but becomes quite tedious over the space of 87 minutes, a bit like listening to somebody moaning and never saying anything positive. The acting is very poor and isn’t helped by characters being introduced with little or no explanation as to who they are or what they’re involvement is, especially at the beginning of the film when it should be establishing who is who, and overall it’s a film that does nothing better than the films it is emulating which begs the question as to why you’d really want to bother with it when you could be having a much better time with something else far more entertaining.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Chris Ward
Originally published October 17, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
