Jul 8

Jul 8 Movie Review : A Dark Song (2016)

* Another suggestion from The Incredible Amoeba *

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional basketball player. Never mind that I was a medium-built, slow-footed French Canadian who barely played for his high school team, I just figured that if I wanted it hard enough, the universe would eventually get tired of saying no and let me in. Well, it didn't. And it took me years to redirect that same misplaced intensity into more achievable goals and fulfill my destiny of becoming the LeBron James of overthinking movies.

Liam Gavin’s directorial debut A Dark Song is a story about what happens when you refuse to take no for an answer from the universe, and it finally says: "Okay. Come on in. But you’re not going to like it."

A Dark Song is about a woman named Sophia (Catherine Walker), who’s grieving so hard she decides to punch a hole through reality. She hires a gruff, pissy occultist named Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram) to help her perform the Abramelin ritual, a months-long spiritual obstacle course that supposedly lets you talk to your guardian angel… or your dead kid, if you’re persuasive enough.

The two hole up in a remote house, cut themselves off from the world, and begin what looks like a cross between an ayahuasca trip and a locked-room therapy session. At first, it’s all salt circles and philosophical foreplay. But the ritual has rules. And when they start getting bent, things get weird fast like, reality-might-be-melting-and-no-one’s-sure-what’s-going-on kind of weird.

Belief And Reality (And Atmosphere in Horror Films)

This movie has quietly divided the handful of people who actually watched it since it came out in 2016. And it’s not hard to see why. On paper, A Dark Song is mostly just a desperate woman getting yelled at by a grouchy occultist who makes her drink gross stuff, crawl on floors, and submit to a never-ending stream of physical and psychological abuse. At one point, he sexually assaults her. Then he kills her. Then he brings her back so he can yell at her some more. It’s grim.

And it’s filmed in this blunt, dispassionate way, like it’s just another Tuesday in grief-based black magic. But guess what? That’s not even the scary part.

A Dark Song doesn’t get scary because of what happens, it gets scary because of how the air changes. One minute, the house is just a house. Cold, damp, miserable. Then things start shifting sideways. Lights flicker. Voices come through locked doors. Sophia’s dead son starts talking to her through the fucking keyhole. But even then, the movie doesn’t scream "boo", it only whispers "maybe".

It keeps asking how far reality can bend before you stop calling it reality. How many coincidences does it take before you're forced to admit that something bigger might be happening or worse, that you might be the one making it happen.

The fascinating thing about A Dark Song is that it’s not really a movie about faith. There’s no ambiguity in the end. The Abramelin ritual works or at least, something happens that doesn’t leave much room for metaphor. This isn’t about belief, it’s about conviction. About how far you’re willing to go, and who you have to become, to see something through.

Sophia starts off driven by a kind of volcanic grief, this all-consuming anger that convinces her she can force the universe to answer for her pain. But what she finds instead is a gauntlet. An emotional, physical, and spiritual ass-kicking that demands transformation. To circle back to the basketball thing: she plays one game in the NBA and walks off the court knowing exactly where her life has to go next. And that’s what makes A Dark Song an interesting (or at least intriguing) movie.

Minimalist Realism And Other Questionable Ideas

Now, A Dark Song is obsessed with keeping things grounded to a point it can get painful. The camera never leaves the house. The story never leaves Sophia and Solomon. Everything happens in the here and now, like some emotionally hostile stage play. And while that stripped-down realism gives the film its unique tension, it also makes things drier than they need to be. The stakes are murky. Solomon yells at Sophia for lying to him, but we’re never really told what she lied about.

We’re never sure what actually happened to her son. We don’t even know if she knows. All we have is her cryptic explanations nd weird evasions, which work for the vibe but not for the connection.

And I’m not saying we needed a full-on melodramatic flashback where she watches her kid get run over in slow motion. But something. A flash. A vision. A scene where she faces the truth and we get to face it with her. Instead, we get a whole lot of suspicion directed at Solomon, and not much reflection aimed inward. I get that realism was the priority here that Liam Gavin wanted the paranoia and distrust to feel real. But emotional realism matters too.

And if we’re going to follow this woman into hell, it’d help to know what she’s running from in the first place.

A Dark Song is a taut, original, and brutally minimalistic film about grief powerful enough to tear a hole in the fabric of reality. It’s appropriately disturbing, but it often feels more interested in impressing practicing occultists than connecting with regular people who just want to feel something. If that was the goal, mission accomplished. Every bit of praise it gets now is just bonus points.

But still, part of me can’t shake the feeling that a more emotionally resonant film is buried somewhere in all that salt and candle wax, one that didn’t just show us the ritual, but let us fully understand the person performing it.