The Darkness of the Road (2021) takes a few risks in how it composes its particular brand of existential horror. With a very limited set (long shots are curtailed by, well, the darkness of the road), a tiny number of characters and a disrupted narrative arc, the film sacrifices a lot of the usual plot drivers in order to focus on its nightmarish, often surreal style. There are a couple of lags and a couple of outstanding questions but, if you wait for it, it does join the dots in a reasonably successful – and certainly a striking – way.
The film starts with a young woman, Siri (The Stylist‘s Najarra Townsend) and her young daughter Eve, who are both out on the road in the back of beyond somewhere late one night – it seems they’re heading out on a remote highway towards a new life. They stop off at a small garage, where Siri runs into a peculiar pair of clerks: one is older, and about as responsive as her sleeping child, whilst the other is more ‘chipper’, asking the inevitable questions about where her boyfriend is, sneeringly overcharging her and so on. A minor comedy of errors ensues, which ends up with car trouble and a girl from the service station hitching a lift out of there, as it seems she’s also trying to get away from her old life.
The two women hit the road and talk: however, they are soon jerked out of their conversation by a sudden turn of bizarre events, seemingly culminating in the realisation that little Eve is no longer in the back seat of the car. In a panic, Siri and her passenger try to navigate this situation, but whether in the broken-down-again vehicle or in the unlit wilds, they realise their precariousness. It’s soon apparent that the timeline here is disrupted, and things quickly feel disorientated, but key questions linger: what is out there? And how much of Siri’s perceptions can be trusted?
Clearly director and writer Eduardo Rodriguez is very deliberately foregrounding atmosphere here, and he achieves this in various ways. Firstly, the film looks very striking, and whilst it could have been drab and under-lit and perfectly plausibly so, given most of the film takes place in the dead of night, it instead looks very painterly, with lots of vivid, rich colours and contrasts, night scenes or not. For example, the blue of the night is incredibly intense, and contrasts with the pale yellow of the car’s interior light very nicely. There’s much more of this too, and care has clearly been taken with how the shots are composed, how they are lit and how they all interconnect. This dreamlike atmosphere also relies to some extent on the very fractured nature of the story as it unfolds, which means a fair few gaps in logic and a rather jagged feel – not for everyone, sure, but something which overarches the whole movie.
There are some horror staples, too, such as the ever-malfunctioning mobile phone trope, but to be fair, the film still manages to instil a decent pace early on, hurling different elements at the screen. Based on the first ten or fifteen minutes, The Darkness of the Road could have gone in a few different directions: the survivalist perils of a remote location, the perils of abrasive, likely dangerous locals or the perils of supernatural terrors. (It helps, I think, to go into this film blind, like this reviewer did.) In the end, it shifts away from any of that, at least in any straightforward sense, though there are some grisly and disturbing scenes. Actresses Najarra Townsend and Leah Lauren are more than equal to this, though it’s Townsend who bears the brunt of the ordeals; her character is perhaps somewhat more accepting of various hideous sequences than many of us would be, but that’s in keeping with the film as a whole. The whole balance of the film – performances included – is about disorientation, which eventually gives way to grim understanding.
This female-led film doesn’t answer all of the questions it raises, and maybe a little more on the relationship between the two women would make the conclusion more satisfying, but in terms of the never-ending bad dream it sets out to explore? It certainly does that. If you like it introspective and bleak, though framed and displayed in a visually very effective way, then there is a lot here to like.
The Darkness of the Road (2021) is available on DVD, Digital and On-Demand now.