This low-budget US drama from Tim Sutton is inspired by the 2012 cineplex shooting in Aurora, Colorado; in the week after Charlottesville, this studiously arty investigation of the US plague of social rage comes across as well-meaning but ineffectual. Its fragmented series of vignettes shows a selection of characters – skateboarders and other affectless kids, an Iraq veteran, a fitness-obsessed young woman – drifting towards what we know will be a shocking conclusion. This frustrating piece says at once too little and too much – withholding basic information while constantly gesturing at a familiar anaesthesised soul-of-America message. The glacial beauty of the images by Hélène Louvart, cinematographer for Agnès Varda and Wim Wenders, makes for elegantly detached video art – by way of Gus Van Sant, Michael Haneke and Larry Clark – but Dark Night offers nothing in the way of revelation, social or aesthetic.
