Dark Corners is the rookie screenwriting and directorial effort of Ray Gower. Though his debut outing exhibits much initial energy, the film begins to wear upon the viewer much like a cute, yet grossly hyperactive, child (in much the same time span). What remains is a diluted, less potent rendition of a David Lynch mindbender.
Frustrated that she has had to resort to in vitro fertilization treatments in hopes of conceiving, Susan Hamilton (Thora Birch) begins to have night terrors which involve Karen Clarke (Thora Birch), a mortician’s assistant and doppelganger of Susan, who is being pursued by the Night Stalker (Oliver Price). In an attempt to alleviate herself of her nightmares, she divulges her woes to a psychoanalyst named Woodleigh (Toby Stephens).
Thematically, Dark Corners borrows very liberally from Tarsem Singh’s The Cell and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, complete with the latter’s import of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Visually, Gower dips his brush quiet regularly from the palette of Lynch while casting extras from some of the master’s films as well. However, this doesn’t mean to imply that Gower is comparable to any of the aforementioned virtuosos of cinema. Granted, Dark Corners does attempt to weave a web of epistemological intrigue and is fraught with requisite symbolism (numbers, keys, etc.), yet the director loses, not only himself, but his audience midway through the feature.
Dark Corners shifts between polar worlds, realms which are inevitably going to collide by the picture’s climax. Yet, unlike the epic plot pileups of Hitchcock, Tarsem, and Lynch, Gower’s work is not invigorating and fails to be exciting. Whereas a five-car wreck on the interstate demands a large degree of rubbernecking, Gower’s finale is analogous to someone getting a ticket. He beings to lose speed and drain the tension he has created via redundancy without providing an aesthetic necessity for such. As other critics have complained, once the pattern has been outlined, instead of further developing plot or characterization, Gower continues to retread time and time again, ad infintum.
Though we want to know how the feature ends, our interest as such is lackluster at best, due largely to the highly predicable nature of who might be the viable parties involved atop the piecemeal issuing of various clues. Nary one red herring appears (staples in the works of Lynch and Hitchcock) as we quickly realize that the film is perhaps too sparse in its symbolism and organization to leave very many (engaging) possibilities. When we do arrive at the conclusion, four potential readings render themselves as viable candidates, three of which can be quickly eliminated after scant consideration of their legitimacy, thus leaving a very dreary presentation of a psychological fugue in the film’s wake while one avenue, which would have thereby validated a particular symbolic strand (regarding twins), is sadly neglected.
Much like Christophe Gans’s Silent Hill released earlier the same year, Ray Gower’s Dark Corners is a visual treat. However, much like every piece of candy, eye or otherwise, there is little substance once everything has finally melted away. In lieu of all of the Baconian bells and Lynchian whistles, what remains is psychological goth without the sadistic, vindictive bite. In short, Dark Corners is a poor man’s version of a David Lynch film and, what’s more, one in which he shot while suffering from the flu throughout its filming.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
