Darkness Review Country : USA Year: 2005 Genre: Horror/Occult Format: Theater Running Time: 88 minutes Distributor: Dimension A mysterious house in the Spanish countryside harbors a hideous secret, and unspeakable evil is about to take hold of the family who has moved in..... Credits Directed by Jaume Balaguero. Written by Jaume Balaguero and Fernando de Felipe. Starring Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen and Giancarlo Gianni. A flag should go up for a film that has been distributed overseas for two years while sitting in a cannister in a domestic cubby. A quick look at its cast (Anna Paquin and Giancarlo Gianni are the only recognizable names), and you wonder why Dimension decided to wide-open this 2002 potboiler for this year's Christmas horror snag. The answer could be, maybe because it's damned good? It doesn't start out that way, though, folks. An American (because of their accents, though all actors are non-American) family moves into a stately farm house somewhere in the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain. Things immediately go awry, like the faucet's water pressure fading out, then turning the flow water dark for a few moments. Then the lights flicker on and off. The college-aged daughter Regina (Anna Paquin) senses there's something wrong, and her stalwart grandfather in town (Giancarlo Gianni) can only offer her superficial reassurances. Her dad Mark (Iain Glen) has been having relapses from an unspecified childhood affliction, walking through his scenes like a lobotomized Bryan Cranston. The mom Maria (Lena Olin) retreats into bitchy denial, while the erstwhile clairvoyant son Paul (Stephan Enquist) seems to know something weird is going on. Problem is, he knows nothing of the real danger. Darkness fails during its first act because of substandard production values. Obviously-Spaniard actors speak with poorly-synched American voice-overs; old newspapers are found with English headlines; it seems that the family has no real back-story except for the spasmatic and unintelligible prologue. It improves signifcantly, though. How about that grotesque portrait of three bespectacled hags which Dad makes Paul hang on the wall? And how about the hags' habit of slipping out of the painting and onto the ceiling above, where they crawl menacingly....thanks, guys. Like I needed more nightmares. This house is not right. Regina and her painter friend Carlos (Fele Martinez), who becomes her confidante, cotton onto the house's wicked backstory--apparently, forty years ago a mass atrocity was planned during a solar eclipse but was foiled at the last minute. The architect, an infirm Spaniard named Villalobos (Fermi Reixach) is searched out and confronted, and he provides more clues into the history of the house, and he reveals that its design is an occultic invitation to hideous demonic intercession into the natural world. And guess what? An identical solar eclipse is a-coming this very week. And more than one character is not what he or she seems. Director Jaume Balaguero relies heavily on Kubrick-esque montage shots, including the dizzying flash-cuts which helped to tank Joe Chappelle's <>Halloween VI and other flicks. These drag Darkness down during its first half, but they actually contribute to the magic of the film's terrifying finale. And Gianni, whose most recent genre appearance was as the doomed Inspector Pazzi in 2001's Hannibal, shines here as the comfort figure who's not quite what he seems. The PG-13 rating is deceptive. Darkness contains no gore, but its final section is horrifyingly brutal in its implications. Balaguero deserves credit, along with his co-scripters Fernando de Felipe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, for creating one of the new millenium's horror masterpieces. MORE INFO Review by Petch Lucas, for Pitofhorror.com