Just How Bad Is The Direct-To-Streaming ‘Dark Places’?

Those who became fans of Gillian Flynn after her runaway bestseller Gone Girl became somewhat over an overnight success, spawning an Academy Award-nominated film directed by auteur David Fincher, probably went straight to her previous novels. One of those books, Dark Places, now has a film adaptation of its own, and with a powerful all-star cast attached. Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Chloe Grace Moretz star in the gritty, dark movie, with Mad Men‘s Christina Hendricks and House of Cards‘ Corey Stoll in supporting roles.

But how does a movie based on a bestselling book and starring A-list actors get dumped in the contemporary equivalent to the straight-to-video bin? That’s right: quietly released in last week, Dark Places is already available for purchase on VOD platforms.

The simple answer: it’s a messy, convoluted thriller that doesn’t know exactly where it wants to go.

The premise is intriguing enough. Theron plays the brooding loner Libby Day, the sole survivor of a massacre that left her mother and sisters dead. Her brother Ben was convicted of the crime despite the lack of physical evidence that proved his guilt, but the film makes it clear that an ’80s-era obsession with Satanic cults led the community to believe that the heavy metal-listening Ben performed a ritualistic sacrifice and used his family members as his prey. Considering the real-life stories of the West Memphis Three (the subjects of the acclaimed Paradise Lost trilogy of documentaries, who were eventually released from prison thanks to ongoing investigations fueled by the films’ popularity), this is the most interesting plot line of the film’s many feuding narratives.

Libby must confront the question of her brother’s innocence when she’s contacted by a member of Kill Club, played by Theron’s Mad Max: Fury Road co-star Hoult. The club consists of amateur sleuths who are convinced of their abilities to solve true crimes (think of the Serial fanatics who populated Reddit earlier this year). She reluctantly agrees to help them with the case (in exchange for money), and finally visits her brother in prison, sharing some particularly awkward family reunion scenes.

If those two ripped-from-the-headlines style plots weren’t enough, we also learn that young Ben had gotten his crazy girlfriend (played by Moretz) pregnant. Oh, and she actually worshipped the devil, convincing him (along with her American Indian drug buddy) to go slaughter cows in the name of Satan. And if you need more story lines, there’s more: Libby’s mother was poor and desperate to raise money to raise her four kids (having lost one already to a Satan-worshipping maniac), and her estranged husband was also a complete fuck-up who comes by every so often to shake her down for cash. (Libby, upon reuniting with her father in the present-day, actually utters the line, through voice-over, no less, “I wonder what it said about me… that my own father was living in a toxic waste dump.”) (I think it says you’re a character in a crappy movie.)

The film was written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, whose last film was the acclaimed French drama Sarah’s Key starring Kristin Scott Thomas. His first American feature (his second English-language film), however, is a total mess. The story is particularly wandering and insane, and I wonder if the film suffers because it sticks too closely to Flynn’s novel, which is nearly 400 pages. A meandering mystery works better in the format of a novel than in a film that clocks in at less than two hours, and it’s possible that Paquet-Brenner didn’t tighten the plot, cut loose ends, and focus on the more important thematic narratives.

Ultimately, though, its immediate VOD release hammers another nail into the death of the video store. While plenty of great films have recently received simultaneous theatrical and digital releases (Dark Places, I should note, did get an extremely limited theatrical run), it’s a lot easier — and cheaper — to avoid marketing and distribution costs by digitally shelving a bad movie (with flashbacks and voice-over to explain its many plots!). Dark Places might appeal to the biggest Gillian Flynn fans, but if you haven’t read the book, I’m betting you’ll be confused, lost, and eventually disappointed in the off-the-wall climax.

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Photos courtesy Everett collection