Do you love Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Chloe Grace Moretz, Corey Stoll or Christina Hendricks? Did you love Gone Girl, which I still have yet to see? Then don’t waste 118 minutes watching this crap. I’m not kidding. When I found out that it was based on a novel by the same author who did Gone Girl, Gone Girl moved down in my queue.
Dark Places feels like a focus group said, “Hey, what if someone survived Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood? AND we could deal with the 80s paranoia over rape in day care and Satanism, but there is actual dabbling in Satanism with a dash of No Country for Old Men. And what about that HBO Films documentary, Paradise Lost!” The visual metaphors felt belabored instead of enlightening as the main character digs through the clutter and rushes through various dark storage places like attics, cellars or toxic waste dumps to escape her past. Get it! DARK PLACES! The big plot twist regarding the murderers’ identity actually was so simultaneously far-fetched and ridiculous that it hurt my soul.
What did I actually learn from Dark Places? That Christina Hendricks and Jennifer Pierce Mathus have big butts, which I think is a great thing, but that you can’t cast them and the willowy Charlize Theron as a blood relation because no. Genetics don’t work that way. I originally saw Dark Places on October 16, 2015, and I think that time has only benefitted the movie because I’m sure that if I wrote the review earlier, it would have been even more scathing. Don’t see Dark Places!