It
is sort of like ethnographic research for the campfire. Indigenous filmmaker
Warwick Thornton invited Australians to submit stories about their
interactions with the spirit world as part of a larger oral history project with an aboriginal focus.
However, the results were not always as spooky as he expected. Family and loss
are the primary themes of the thirteen tales re-told by screen-actors in The Darkside (trailer here), Thornton’s
documentary by monologue, which screens during the American Museum of Natural
History’s 2014 Margaret Mead Film Festival.
Like
nearly every anthology film, Darkside is
a bit uneven, but Thornton, serving as his own cinematographer, always gives
his static shots a warm eerie glow befitting the subject matter. By far the
scariest story (and the one most riveting to watch) chronicles the tragedy
wrought on the narrator’s family by a cast-off Ouija board. Occasionally,
Thornton breaks format, as when he pans and scans the darkened corridors of the
National Film and Sound Archive. Another more traditionally creepy tale of the supernatural,
it should particularly interest AMNH patrons, since it involves poet Romaine
Moreton’s brush with the malevolent spirit of Sir Colin Mackenzie, the notorious
director of the discredited Australian Institute of Anatomy, whose building was
repurposed to serve as the film archive.
For
fans of 1980s movies, it is quite amusing to see Bryan Brown turn up as one of
the storytellers, but his yarn does not have the archetypal weight of the
better installments. Easily, the most emotionally resonant tale is logically
the final chapter, whereas the penultimate segment features the liveliest
delivery. Oddly, the weakest anecdote, a mere sketch about a traditional
aboriginal grandfather’s response to a lunar eclipse apparently inspired the one-sheet,
but at least most of the constituent ghost stories hold some sort of deeper
cultural significance.
