The success of Gillian Flynn’s mystery novel Gone Girl, filmed with Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, has now given us this middling screen adaptation of her cold-case thriller Dark Places. There are moments of macabre horror here, and interesting nods to Capote’s In Cold Blood, as well as America’s satanic abuse scare and the Robin Hood Hills case. It also, incidentally, brings in a child molestation sub-plot accompanied by Joan Jett’s cover of Gary Glitter’s Do You Wanna Touch Me on the soundtrack: it’s difficult to tell if the provocation is deliberate. All in all, its contrivances might have been indulged more satisfyingly in a TV miniseries.
Producer-star Charlize Theron plays Libby Day, messed up and unemployed: the now grownup survivor of a mass slaying that happened 30 years earlier, which we periodically see in flashback. Theron’s natural glamour and style is suppressed, unconvincingly, by her wearing a baseball cap. Her mum (Christina Hendricks, now in danger of typecasting) was slaughtered at their Kansas farmhouse, along with her two sisters, and her then teen brother is now serving a life jail term for this, having claimed to be a satanist, confessed to the crime and relished his moment of notoriety in court. Three decades on, a true-crime murder buff (Nicholas Hoult), offers Libby a lot of money to help him reopen the case. Writer-director Gilles Paquet-Brenner made the decent French wartime drama Sarah’s Key. This is just dull pulp.
