Dark Night Review

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A muddling, disappointing look at gun violence in America.

By Alex Welch

This is an advance review out of the AFI Film festival.

There are two films playing at AFI Fest this year that address the topic of gun violence in America. The first is the star-studded Miss Sloane, which focuses on a group of political lobbyists trying to get a gun control bill passed in the Senate. The second is writer and director Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, which focuses on the people and events leading up to a movie theatre shooting loosely inspired by the events of Aurora, Colorado in 2012, when an armed gunman entered a midnight showing of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire.

Where the material to make a tense, emotionally devastating, and important film seems wholly available with a premise like that, Sutton instead has created a confused, uninteresting, and overlong movie with Dark Night. That’s saying something as well, since the final runtime clocks in at a short 85 minutes, and still manages to feel like one of the longest theatre experiences you’ll have all year. In fact, what he’s done with Dark Night seems more suited for a half-hour short film than it does the feature Sutton has stretched it into being.

Now, that’s not to say that Dark Night isn’t a memorable film, and Sutton litters it with some of the more haunting images that I’ve seen in the cinema all year, like a group of girls singing “You Are My Sunshine” while the muzzle of an assault rifle slowly peeks in the window behind one of the girl’s heads, but it’s everything that he fills the rest of Dark Night with that disappoints. These include the characters, none of whom are given names and have so little dialogue or much to do that it doesn’t matter how beautifully Sutton frames them before you start to feel like he and they are simply wasting your time.

Like for instance the way that Sutton presents Anna Rose Hopkins’ young female character as being obsessed with her body and visual presentation, trying to make it into the film industry, or accruing some kind of internet fame at least. While the scene of her calling a casting department, masquerading as her own “agent” perfectly expresses her sense of desperation for the spotlight, Sutton seems to think that you won’t understand her need to feel famous or beautiful unless he shows you three, full scenes of her posing for selfies. There’s even an added, unnecessary brief moment of nudity.

All of this adds up to an ending that feels appropriately tragic and heartbreaking, but not so much because of what Sutton has done as a director, so much as it’s just the simple fact that any shootings, ever, are emotionally devastating. The cheap, winking nods towards the audience when a girl puts on a fake Batman mask, or when he does a zoom in on a poster for a fake vigilante movie called “Dark Night,” only threaten to further cheapen the overall sincerity of the subject matter, injecting it with an inappropriately juvenile attitude.

There’s an understandable desire to paint these lives as mundane as possible, in order to further illustrate that this could happen to any one of us, at any time, but the cold and distant way Sutton shows us each of the characters makes it hard to understand who any of these people are outside of the small stereotypes he’s thinly sketched them with. None of them are fully fleshed out, and aren’t even given the chance to be either.

The real disappointment with Dark Night is how it so drastically falls short of the inherent promise its premise offers. Where Sutton could have created a brief, day-in-the-life picture of everyday America, just on the brink of yet another devastating attack on its innocence, he’s instead given us a lot of very nice-looking vignettes that don’t amount to much more than that. There are nice ideas in Dark Night too, like the way that Sutton constantly frames his characters on the other side of dividers or walls, trying to visualize the sense that we’re all just becoming more and more separated from each other. The only problem then is that by failing to provide much of a narrative momentum or characters who feel at all like real people, he’s instead just distanced the audience even further from his film.

There’s no denying that the intentions of Dark Night are admirable, but those ambitions aren’t enough to stop it from feeling like a confused, lifeless picture in the end. You don’t need to look much further than the pair of skateboarders riding around the film’s central town, who bear absolutely no weight on the story or other characters in the film, to understand how completely Sutton seems to be missing out on what he could have done with Dark Night.

Cinelicious Pics will release Dark Knight domestically sometime in 2017.

The Verdict

Director and writer Tim Sutton proves he has more than enough talent to make visually arresting cinema with Dark Night, but doesn’t bother to give much more than that here.

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