Two young girls, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michelle Dotrice) are on a summer cycling holiday in rural France. It’s sunny, bright and picturesque; the atmosphere is relaxed, both girls are having fun and Cathy is keen to soak up the sun a little, but Jane is keen to press on to the next village. As they leave a youth hostel on their way onwards, they pass a young man who seems to take an interest in the pair; he overtakes them on the road, and seems to be waiting for them at the next town.
In actual fact, the girls aren’t coming – they’re squabbling about how best to spend the rest of the holiday, and the argument escalates to the point that Jane decides to leave the recalcitrant Cathy to her own devices, cycling off alone. Cathy is happy enough at first, but soon both girls become acutely aware of the dangers of their isolation. Jane waits for her friend to arrive, but all is not well and she cycles back to look for her. She’s been warned in broken English that the area is ‘bad’, and by now she’s gleaned a little about a murder in the local vicinity too. It remains to be seen whether Jane is in time to find her friend safe; equally so, the young man from the earlier village, Paul (Sandor Elès) is still on the scene and claims to want to help, but Jane is finding it very difficult to know who to trust…
Directed by Robert Fuest, who would go on to make rather more ornate, overblown films like The Abominable Doctor Phibes, And Soon The Darkness is a rather different beast. It’s very economical, making excellent use of a very small cast and a small number of key locations, albeit that there are more than enough shots of the wider countryside and its deserted roads to make the point that this is a very isolated part of the world. As attractive as the area is, it pales against the small-scale human drama going on within it – a point which is underlined, at the very end of the film, by the sight of two other female cyclists departing into the great beyond. Whatever befalls Jane and Cathy, it is almost immediately lost within the wider environment, something which makes their story all the more plaintive; they are small-scale, lost against something bigger.
With regards the colourful, bright summer landscape, there are a couple of films which have used similar to good effect but – regardless of the fact that the horror itself is different – it put me somewhat in mind of Midsommar, which features another idyll which turns out to not be as idyllic as it at first appears to be. Also, the language issue is a key factor in the bewilderment and fear which overtakes Jane as she tries to help; the foreign land might be in Europe, and might be ostensibly as modern and as forward-thinking as we would hope, but without being able to understand what anyone is saying, it might as well be a million miles away. The fact that the film retains the original French without throwing the audience so much as a subtitle helps to preserve this sense of isolation. Female vulnerability is also a key plot component in And Soon The Darkness, and it would be foolish to glance over this: the girls are followed, warned and ultimately endangered here on account of their sex, although we’re probably primed nowadays to see all of the girls’ encounters as potential problems – a lot of the male attention they receive never turns into anything sinister, and they seem fairly confident in how to handle it – well, for the most part, of course, and as ever, there’s always a point where things ultimately turn irreparably sour. The film was made in 1970, and the past is (also) a foreign country, though that’s as often as not part of the appeal of these older films – taking in the world in which the narratives operate, how it looks and how it works.
Amongst the film’s many strengths, you can also count ambiguity; it’s difficult to trust anyone here, appearances are monstrously deceptive and (with the exception of one absurd plot point where one of the girls hangs her clean, dry underwear on a nearby tree, presumably simply to generate clues) the events which befall these girls are very plausible, again given the time and place. Certainly, the perils of lone travel in an unfamiliar country have seen the film judged worthy of a remake within the past ten years; spoiler alert, but there, mobile phones don’t seem to solve the core issues either.
Trust is a hard thing to come by in this well-wrought, often unbearably tense piece of cinema. The audience is kept on the same level as the girls throughout, never privy to some great saving grace or way through, and that – together with the fantastic job Studiocanal have done with their remaster – makes for a worthwhile, prudent and clever film.
And Soon The Darkness received a release by Studiocanal (Blu-ray and DVD) on 14th October 2019.