I watched 'Dark Encounter' on a whim, knowing little about it. I love low-budget sci-fi with ambitious themes - Coherence, Cosmos, The Vast of Night, Primer. So I was prepared to love this. I didn't.
Firstly, and most importantly, a warning: I assumed this was a movie about alien encounters. It's not. It has aliens in it, but it's a movie about the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl, and it's a dark, disturbing story with no happy ending. I was shocked by the turn the story took, and I actually wouldn't have watched it had I known.
Secondly, the film itself is not well made. I realised almost immediately that I was watching a movie featuring British actors in a British landscape. Why on earth did they set it in Pennsylvania? The accents ranged from "Foghorn Leghorn" to "Woody from Toy Story" ("THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BOOT!") and the costumes were clichéd (plaid shirts and cowboy boots). Most of the performances would have been much more convincing if they'd been permitted to speak with British accents, and the same story transported to North Yorkshire would have needed few changes.
The plot, which moves at a glacial pace, is pretty sparse. It's 15 minutes before anything even happens, and when it does, it's 50 minutes of jump scares, coloured lights, smoke machines, and people standing around gawping. There's little dialogue, except of the "they're in the basement!" variety, and the actors have clearly been directed to simply stand there with their mouths open as wide as possible most of the time. Mel Raido is particularly guilty of this, and in fact he hams it up in most of his scenes, sobbing hysterically and sinking to the floor while everyone else is standing around waiting for something to happen.
The film makes very heavy use of slow motion and an overbearing, melodramatic score, to the extent that the final third of the move is almost exclusively music and slow-mo. And though the CGI when it comes to actual extra-terrestrial stuff is better than expected for such a small budget, the story doesn't support it. It makes no sense whatsoever that aliens from several galaxies away would intervene to solve this one case of a missing American child and not the 800,000 similar cases in the US alone each year.
Nor does it make sense that they went about it in the terrifying, cataclysmic way they did. Why come all this way and freak out the inhabitants of a small town when they could have just sent the sheriff and email explaining what happened to the missing kid and pointing him in the direction of the necessary evidence? Were they just on an intergalactic grocery run? How did they know what happened anyway? Are they omniscient? Can they help us with stuff like global warming and COVID-19, or do they only investigate unsolved crimes?
The writers make no attempt to explain any of this, and you really have to be satisfied with bright lights and spooky noises in the attic to enjoy the movie. If that's enough for you, then you're probably one of the handful of people who have given 'Dark Encounters' 10 stars.
Firstly, and most importantly, a warning: I assumed this was a movie about alien encounters. It's not. It has aliens in it, but it's a movie about the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl, and it's a dark, disturbing story with no happy ending. I was shocked by the turn the story took, and I actually wouldn't have watched it had I known.
Secondly, the film itself is not well made. I realised almost immediately that I was watching a movie featuring British actors in a British landscape. Why on earth did they set it in Pennsylvania? The accents ranged from "Foghorn Leghorn" to "Woody from Toy Story" ("THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BOOT!") and the costumes were clichéd (plaid shirts and cowboy boots). Most of the performances would have been much more convincing if they'd been permitted to speak with British accents, and the same story transported to North Yorkshire would have needed few changes.
The plot, which moves at a glacial pace, is pretty sparse. It's 15 minutes before anything even happens, and when it does, it's 50 minutes of jump scares, coloured lights, smoke machines, and people standing around gawping. There's little dialogue, except of the "they're in the basement!" variety, and the actors have clearly been directed to simply stand there with their mouths open as wide as possible most of the time. Mel Raido is particularly guilty of this, and in fact he hams it up in most of his scenes, sobbing hysterically and sinking to the floor while everyone else is standing around waiting for something to happen.
The film makes very heavy use of slow motion and an overbearing, melodramatic score, to the extent that the final third of the move is almost exclusively music and slow-mo. And though the CGI when it comes to actual extra-terrestrial stuff is better than expected for such a small budget, the story doesn't support it. It makes no sense whatsoever that aliens from several galaxies away would intervene to solve this one case of a missing American child and not the 800,000 similar cases in the US alone each year.
Nor does it make sense that they went about it in the terrifying, cataclysmic way they did. Why come all this way and freak out the inhabitants of a small town when they could have just sent the sheriff and email explaining what happened to the missing kid and pointing him in the direction of the necessary evidence? Were they just on an intergalactic grocery run? How did they know what happened anyway? Are they omniscient? Can they help us with stuff like global warming and COVID-19, or do they only investigate unsolved crimes?
The writers make no attempt to explain any of this, and you really have to be satisfied with bright lights and spooky noises in the attic to enjoy the movie. If that's enough for you, then you're probably one of the handful of people who have given 'Dark Encounters' 10 stars.