Dark Encounter review: A grieving family must face down with beings from another world in this masterclass in scares on a small scale.
Signature Entertainment
On November 1982 little Maddie Anderson goes missing. A year later, on the anniversary of her disappearance, her family gather to remember her, having just had a memorial service minus a body. It’s obviously a sad time for all, but it’s made worse when strange lights appear in the sky and other members of the family begin to vanish.
Director Carl Strathie certainly knows how to play with his audience. He almost insidiously manoeuvres a story of a grief-stricken family dealing with tragedy into something bloodcurdlingly terrifying. The first contact is simply a solitary orange light moving through the trees, but it is its strangeness in movement that grabs the audiences attention. I myself found the hairs on the back of my arm stand up at this moment. The dread continues during the second contact, which now in the homestead, goes from flashing lights, dead phone lines and electrical disturbances, to a sudden silence and rooms bathed in yellow and blue lights of building intensity. The atmosphere is so oppressive that you can almost feel the light pulsating. The silence is broken by jarring footsteps, it is then that the viewer’s heart attack kicks in.
Signature Entertainment
Strathie very much buys into the mantra that less is more, focusing much more on the light and sound design. When he does reveal the other beings, it’s fleeting, just a hand print here, a reflection there. This restrained way of handling the ‘aliens’ is a welcome break to the normal.
We’ve all seen films set in a cabin in the woods that gets visited by visitors from another planet, they’re practically a genre staple. Yet, it’s unlikely you’ve seen anything quite like Dark Encounter before. This is much more of a cerebral science-fiction, more in the vein of films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Interstellar than an abduction tale like Fire in the Sky or Extraterrestrial. That’s not to say that the chills aren’t still there – they most certainly are – but in elevating itself from its peers, Dark Encounter works on many levels. This is also the kind of film that gets into your head and lingers long after viewing.
Dark Encounter was reviewed at Arrow Video Frightfest 2019. It is released on home entertainment platforms via Signature Entertainment later this year.
