In short: Darkness Visible (2019)

Like every year, the best month of the year (even this year) is going to be all horror all of the time around here, replacing the “all horror two thirds of the time” normalcy. So let’s get to it.

Artist Ronnie (Jez Deol) has grown up in London, raised by his single mom after she left her native India following the kind of issues with her family that leave a woman never wanting to speak with any member of said family again. Ronnie’s an artist, though he usually prefers buildings to canvas. One night, he falls into something of a trance state, creating a piece suggestive of an India he knows about as much about as any English person whose parents weren’t from there initially. When he shows it to his mother, she reacts disturbed, but doesn’t really tell him why.

Perhaps half a day later, a cousin from Kolkata contacts Ronnie through his mother’s cell to tell him that his mother was run over by a car there and is now in a coma. A completely flabbergasted Ronnie flies off to India, where he will find rather a lot of truths he’d better not have learned, become a suspect in a serial killer case, and find his worldview shattered.

Neil Biswas’s Darkness Rising is an interesting first feature-length effort, nearly always atmospheric, and often incisive and telling when it comes to small details that’s let down by a script (by Biswas himself and Ben Hervey) that somewhat loses control in a final act that’s praying much too heavily on the altar of the Gods of the Plot Twist. It’s another one of those affairs where certain twists make quite a few earlier scenes in the movie pointless and illogical, like a bad retcon in a superhero universe. Though, to be fair, Biswas still manages to end on something of a high note of a downer ending that does make sense with the things we’ve learned before, and seems fitting, if not terribly deserved for a character who is the poster child for bad things happening to perfectly alright people.

Until the final act, there are a couple of too convenient moments in the plot, but nothing that Biswas’s direction can’t gloss over very nicely. On the more important front of creating a mood of slight doom and inducing much confused estrangement in our protagonist, the film’s golden, though, the director using Ronnie’s position as a stranger to India by culture even though everyone looking at him sees him as Indian by heritage to turn the world around him strange too, without exoticising India in an awkward way.

In fact, the small details of scenes of Ronnie relating to his newly met family and elements of Indian culture are very important to the effect of the film’s supernatural elements, something that feels like lived experience grounding the stranger elements.

It’s a grounding that’s a great fit for a film that, at its core, seems be about the horror of heritage, not just the heritage people ascribe to one, or the elements of it one chooses to take on or to reject, but those things nobody has control over; perhaps those things one realizes one really rather wouldn’t have learned about in the first place. Home’s not always what it’s cracked up to be.