Dark Summer (2015)

Dark Summer (2015)
Directed by: Paul Solet
Written by: Mike Le
Starring: Grace Phipps, Keir Gilchrist, Maestro Harrell, Stella Maeve

DARK SUMMER (2015)
Directed by Paul Solet

Thumbing my phone I’m beginning this review on the journey home. Not something I’d usually do, but as per an evening spent with streams of spirits in the other sense, Dark Summer is the kind of generic, supernatural horror I’ll be struggling to recall tomorrow morning. That may sound a harsh note to begin on, but its forgettableness is maybe this film’s most memorable feature. Following an all too vague scene-setter we learn that Daniel (Gilchrist) has been cyber-stalking his stereotypically outsider (i.e. weird and introverted) classmate Mona (Phipps). Tut tut. And for this very modern bought of naughtyness he’s been put under house arrest via his probation office Stokes (a hammy Stormare) and clipped with an electronic ankle device and banned from social media. Alas, this punishment goes foiled and before too long his rascal friends Abby (Maeve) and Kevin (Harrell) have brought him a laptop. With justice foiled, he’s back online and up to no good. Soon the troubled stalkee contacts him and after a couple of cryptic sentences blows her own head. But don’t miss her too much! Because minutes later she’s back in ghost form and haunting our protagonist. This summer’s going to be a dark one. Cue a scene involving food turning to something spooky, an evil presence slowly gaining strength for 90 minutes and a complete lack of adult supervision.

Admittedly, unlike At The Devil’s Door (2014), it’s not all something you’ll have seen before. Buried beneath the usual horror tropes there’s an interesting story about modern technology making young people feel increasingly disconnected from each other. And what few genuine relationships we do see depicted are done so fairly convincingly (Maeve is particularly strong). Unfortunately this aspect of the movie is seldom fleshed out and the characters psychological depth is kept at a minimum in favour of prolonged scare sequences. In fairness, some of these set pieces exploit modern technology well, with mp3 players and tablets all playing their parts in freaking out the gang. Furthermore, on a technical level Dark Summer is very competently put together. The soundtrack is  genuinely interesting, and certainly worthy of a much better movie, with the usual horror strings being replaced by fashionable big beats, screeching rave tones and layers of ambient synth. This is matched by some visual flair, tasteful use of effects (for the most part) and an eye for detail that sees the creative team make a lot out of just a single setting.

The problem is that none of these scenes result in much actual tension – it’s mostly just ‘more’ rather than a ‘next’. Typically Daniel will leave his retro computer games to walk through his house before something vaguely psychedelic happens and somewhere nearby Mona appears. In a panic he leaves the room and it all stops. Then, like an old dance single from the 90s, we get a set of similar variants around the same beats until it feels lazy. Consequently the spooky parts are not adequately capitalised on and the fear never escalates. It doesn’t help that the movie feels akin to a series of connected music videos rather than a cohesive whole. The absent dialogue would be missed were the script stronger, but from that which is on offer this would be more like lamenting the school bully than the mythical one that got away. Frustratingly this film manages to be simultaneously exposition heavy (particularly the angsty parts) and austere (the backing story). In line with this the lore is fairly shallow and imprecise with a sorcery angle going under-addressed and the moral-ambiguity shattering twist is robbed of any punch by minimal build-up and an unintentionally funny reveal. On that point, when the audience snigger in chorus at a central teenage character revealing a previously hidden aptitude for Latin, so as to service the plot, then you know the writer has done something wrong. As with his previous effort Grace (2009), director Paul Solet has made a movie that’s equally interesting in its presentation and questionable in its content. Thus being neither a roaring success nor a glorious failure, Dark Summer winds up being the worst thing a horror movie can be: boring. Putting the finishing touches on this a day later and I realise I was right at the beginning – I remember very little about it. And unlike the morning that follows a night blanked by drinking, I doubt there’ll be many people waiting to fill me in.

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