You
have to be intrigued by a horror movie set in India that references John
Milton. It might technically be a British production, but it is definitely still
in tune with the setting and culture of Kolkata. Ronnie the lifelong Londoner
never really knew the city of his birth, but he is about to get immersed in
some local color, whether he likes it or not, in Neil Biswas’s Darkness Visible, which releases today
on DVD, from Blue Fox Entertainment.
Frankly,
Ronnie did not even know he was born in Kolkata. His mum always told him he was
born in London, shortly after she arrived, on her own. Supposedly, his father
abandoned them, but he will soon have reason to doubt that too. Until now, he
never had much interest in his Bengali heritage, because his mother completely
turned her back on it, for as long as he can remember. That is why he is so
stunned when she turns up in a coma in a Kolkata hospital bed, after
mysteriously disappearing on his twentieth-eighth birthday. Of course, viewers
can see she was obviously spooked by his latest graffiti painting of an ominous
painting of a notorious Kolkata neighborhood.
Soon,
Ronnie is meeting Kolkata relatives for the first time and falling under
suspicion for a series of ritualistic murders. He is an easy scapegoat, but Asha,
a police photographer, knows better. She identifies the commonalities with
another series of occult murders that coincidentally happened twenty-eight
years ago. Presumably Ronnie could not have committed those, but Rakhee, a
notorious practitioner of black magic is clearly involved.
Darkness looks great and it
definitely has its creepy moments, but Biswas’s pacing is a bit slack. Frankly,
most viewers will realize around the forty-minute mark that this narrative really
should be much further along by then. Darkness
clocks in at one-hundred one minutes, but it honestly should have come in
around the eighty-to-eighty-five range. Oh well, such is life.
Regardless,
nobody can fault the film when it comes to atmosphere. Biswas and cinematographer
fully capitalize on the noir ambiance of their Kolkata locations. The professional
ensemble also keeps up their end, particularly Jaz Deol, who credibly portrays all
sorts of physical and emotional extremes as Ronnie. Sayani Gupta and Neil Bhoopalam
both counterbalance him quite effectively, as the smart, proactive Asha and Ronnie’s
judgmental cousin AJ, respectively.
Given
the volume of low-to-no budget horror movies released each week, Darkness certainly stands out as something
rather distinctive, but it is still essentially a B-movie. It just does not
have the depth or the archetypal heft of Tumbbad
or Sunrise, yet it is still
sufficiently different to pleasantly distract die-hard genre consumers.
Recommended for fans of non-western horror movies, Darkness Visible releases today (3/12) on DVD.
