Review by Matt Harries
Horror, to use the broad genre tag to which we here at Brutal As Hell are beholden, is a form of entertainment that at its most powerful shocks us. Whether it is with a moment of bloody violence, a startling denouement, or the realisation of a barely fathomable terror; horror gains its claw-hold upon our collective psyches by subjecting us to that which we would normally seek to avoid in our everyday lives. As Dark Touch drew to a flaming close, I found myself thinking ‘bloody hell’. Then shortly afterwards I revelled in watching a relatively unheralded film that made me feel momentarily taken aback. Perhaps though, it is the story’s underlying horror that is the most powerful aspect of the film.
Funnily enough, just a few days ago I finally got round to watching Brian De Palma’s 1976 horror Carrie. This story of a marginalised girl who discovers she has destructive telekinetic powers has several echoes in Dark Touch. But whereas Carrie was in my eyes a rather lurid and overwrought effort, Dark Touch gathers its strength by smothering the story in shadow and suggestion. In Carrie the ending is like the watching a slow-motion accident. You can see it coming, see its inevitability. With Dark Touch I was quite never sure which way the story would go. This made the closing scenes all the more shocking. Apart from anything the demise of the characters in that scene is not exactly deserved. Compare that to Carrie, where Sissy Spacek’s Funhouse moment is the culmination of a deliberately instigated campaign of humiliation.
Caution – spoilers ahead.
The question of the complicity, or otherwise, of various characters in Dark Touch becomes all the more pertinent when the core subject of the film appears to be child abuse. It all begins with 11 year old Niamh (that’s pronounced ‘Neeve’ for all you non-Gaels), caught up in a terrifying yet indistinct situation at her home. As a storm batters the windows and shakes the house, a baby (her sibling) cries. Adult figures loom and pace in menacing silhouette, aggression unmistakeable in their every movement. Niamh then runs through the forest and the rain apparently to escape, whereupon she is taken in by her neighbours. Clearly traumatised, she cannot speak for a bloody wound in her mouth. Instead she thrashes and wails incoherently before the shocked and startled family, until her parents arrive and whisk her away. As her father carries her out the door, a bowl flies from the sideboard and smashes, seemingly in unison with Niamh’s terror. Perhaps a first glimpse at the physical manifestation of her fear.
Any doubt as to the source of Niamh’s pain seems to be further removed when her parents receive a visit from their neighbours Nat and Lucas. The visit was obviously instigated by Niamh’s parents as a follow up to the traumatic events that began the film. As her father explains his worry and describes the possible effects of living in an old wooden house in the country upon his daughter, Niamh uncovers the torso of her baby brother who lies nearby. We see ugly bruising, quickly covered up. Her parents angrily explain that Niamh caused the injuries, jealous of her sibling. As the neighbours leave we briefly glimpse the parents looking down from a first floor window, their expressions strangely menacing. Seconds later Niamh appears at the same window screaming. A high pitched squealing sound causes Nat to wince. Does she share some kind of sense with Niamh, a literal sharp pang of unease?
Niamh is later visited by her parents, who move in the darkness of her room hidden in shadow, asking in low voices for their daughter’s trust. Her father begins to undress. Later she lies in her bed, tears on her cheeks, unable to sleep. The house begins to creak and shake. She steps from her bed as the disturbance seems to increase in intensity along with her tears. She takes her baby brother in her arms as pandemonium ensues; fixtures rip themselves from walls, light bulbs flare and break. Niamh’s parents wake but furniture smashes into her father, crushing his legs; a chandelier explodes, slicing her mother’s flesh. Flames erupt and they meet their grisly, bloody demise. As emergency services search the wreckage in the morning light, they find among the smoke and debris Niamh, inside a cupboard, clutching her baby brother. The baby is dead, according to the paramedic because his ribcage was too tightly compressed. Did Niamh inadvertently kill her brother? What power caused the death of her parents?
All this takes place within the first twenty minutes. From this point on Niamh returns to school, now cared for her neighbours and at school by welfare officer Tanya. Nat and husband Lucas have two children of their own, around Niamh’s age, and are themselves still coming to terms with the fairly recent death of their daughter Mary, who died of cancer. For Nat especially, there is a desire to create a bond between herself and Niamh, as if to heal the wound she still feels through her daughter’s absence. Welfare officer Tanya seems to have a more natural empathy with Niamh. Unlike Nat she does not hear the wince-inducing high pitched squeals that accompany Niamh’s screams. She does though, seem to be able to penetrate the young girl’s fear unlike any other adult. In one scene, she soothes a clearly upset Niamh, allowing her to tenderly touch her own heavily pregnant stomach. Whereas Nat seems to try too hard to find common ground with Niamh, this moment with Tanya felt natural and genuinely tender and was genuinely affecting.
For all that she exhibits tenderness and vulnerability Niamh also has a way of sensing the distress of other children. At the home of Nat and Lucas she feels the pain of a child – in this case that of Mary, their deceased daughter, who she sees in a photograph album, the bruises of her illness marking her frail body. Her suspicion that something untoward is happening between her adoptive guardians and their two surviving children prove unfounded. She continually misreads normal behaviour as potentially threatening, which results in her continuing to struggle to adapt to life in a ‘normal’ household. This sixth sense is awakened by classmates Christine and Peter, who are brother and sister. They exchange long looks with her and something passes between them. She sees bruises on their wrists, sees the way the other children goad them and call them names. One night she is drawn to their house. What she witnesses there causes an even deeper bond to develop between the three of them. It also marks a realisation within Niamh, an awareness of the force within her. A force powered by pain.
In different hands Dark Touch, dealing with the subject of the abuse, alienation and suffering of children, might have become an entirely different film. Using the horror genre as a vehicle with which to tackle a topic usually left to ‘straight’ drama brings a different dimension to our perception of the tortured emotional state and psychological scars suffered by victims of abuse. Despite the well meant intentions of adults, and the stigmatisation that so readily occurs against children by other children, Niamh’s fear, anger and pain refuses to exist quietly within her.
It is difficult to single out individuals for praise in this film, I was impressed with the whole cast. Missy Keating does brilliantly as Niamh. She never comes close to being a caricature, or a typical horror siren; always seeming foremost like a girl who is too young to understand the furies her pain inflicts upon the physical world. The adult cast are also excellent. Almost all the characters they play are well meaning and earnest in their desire to help, but in looking for a violent gang to blame they fail to see that the evil has come from within the world they themselves have helped to create. Director Marina De Van also excels in marshalling the cast and telling the story with understatement and subtlety. Shot in dun, autumnal tones, the atmosphere she helps create is foreboding without being stifling. Pain and poignancy, horror and sympathy are invoked in equal measure.
With so much moral outrage popular in the media these days, Dark Touch chooses a different way to express a victim’s story. If Dark Touch represents the agony of one girl, what terrifying fury would dozens of children who have suffered at the hands of adults feel like? Perhaps it is time they had such a voice as the horror genre can allow them to have; the voice to shock us, and perhaps play some tiny part in instigating a lasting change.
Dark Touch is out on Region 2 DVD on 13th October, from Metrodome.