Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (A Dark Song)

Okay, so I got a little carried away there. Whoops. Still, I'd like to think I did that particular book and its intricacies justice. With that out of the way, it's time for another one of those ones that I didn't pick, but that friends of mine did. A Dark Song is not a film I'd ever heard about, or indeed knew anything about going in. I just sort of sat there and let it wash over me. It was an interesting experience, and there's quite a lot going on here but now I get to sit here and try to make sense of it. That's what we do here, and it's what I'm going to do again, so let's talk about this weird little object of a motion picture.

A Dark Song is a magical ritual movie. I don't think the actual film itself is an invocation of anything, but the narrative focuses in great detail on a magic ritual to summon an angel and the movie reflects that in some ways. Rather than a quick scene of casting an incantation and offering a sacrifice or something, the ritual in this movie takes up the majority of the film. It is a slow, laborious, and detailed process that takes literal months with two people locked together in a house, surrounded by a magic circle, and taking every step in order to eventually complete this ritual. It is a tense and fraught thing as the magician hired for this job by our protagonist butts heads with her on several occasions, can be downright mean, and does some real heinous shit in the name of "purifying" the ritual and keeping it on track. It's deeply unpleasant stuff, bordering on watching an abusive relationship play out before our eyes. Though the movie has more visceral horrors in its climax, this is the real horror lurking at play for most of the movie: the fact that this man could snap at the woman at a moment's notice.

That sense of isolation permeates the movie, its setting, and its main theme. Our main protagonist, Sophie, is that isolation. She has retreated to this house to perform this complicated and torturous summoning in order to get vengeance on the occultists who killed her young son. She has isolated herself from the family she has left, in dogged pursuit of this, and endures unspeakable pain and torture in pursuit of this purpose... but the one thing she won't do is ask for forgiveness. That isolation and self-loating is at the very heart of the movie, at the very dark heart of Sophie herself as she goes through the painful months of the ritual. Many of the reviews I saw after watching it called it a "slow burn" movie and it's easy to see why. It just ruminates in this space, these awful feelings, this terrible mood... and then escalates. Its ending is what set the movie a step above for me, though, and I'm choosing not to spoil it but let us just say that enduring this pain and even more causes Sophie to change her mind and find something new to cut against that isolation and hate. Shall we say, perhaps, that Sophie believes in the song in her heart? Cheeky reference, I know, but that's what I got to close this one out. This is a pretty good one, and it grew on me. I don't have much more to say on it. Sometimes, counter to the luxuriously detailed ritual, less is more. Take that less, and enjoy it, and maybe seek this one out this spooky season if you can handle the subject matter.