Darling (2015) - Mickey Keating

Mickey Keating's Darling is the type of film that works best when viewed as an artistic mood piece, a film that shows far more interest in delivering a perverse, stylish genre exercise full of atmosphere and ambiance than it does in delivering a fully realized horror film.  Ambiguous in nature, Darling is centered around an ominous house located deep in the heart of the city, chronicling the slow-burning psychosis of a young woman who was hired to be the caretaker of this old home.  Providing answers of any kind is no interest to the filmmakers of Darling, with the film being quite bare-bones in terms of narrative and plot, opting instead to focus on its perverse descent into insanity which finds our main protagonist slowly reaching the edge of madness as she attempts to make sense of the peculiar occurrences which surrounds her.  Reminiscent of Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Darling's black and white aesthetic of piercing whites and muted blacks provide ample atmosphere and intrigue to its story of one woman's unraveling psychosis, with the film subtlety suggesting that the mansions long corridors, odd sounds, and confinement may have triggered deep-seeded insecurities inside our protagonist, with these mysterious, supernatural forces using her underlying loneliness and solitude  to drive her to such heinous acts of violence later in the film.  Darling is a film which aims to create an abstraction of terror, remaining very ambiguous throughout its running time as it attempts to create this horror-soaked atmosphere where anything and everything  feels in the realm of possibility.  As a mood piece, Darling can be quite impressive in execution, particularly from a cinematography perspective, with the film's use of symmetrical composition and depth of field creating a voyeuristic atmosphere that brings the house itself to life, giving the impression that our main protagonist is being watched by some malevolent force.  The slow and methodical deterioration of this woman's sanity is certainly one of the most compelling attributes of Darling, but the filmmakers stylish sound design at times feels far too didactic in approach.  Featuing an overabundance of piercing sounds, Darling telegraphs to the audience exactly how to feel far too often, while doing so in a way that at times makes the whole experience feel cheap, with the film trying to hard to create its terror-soaked atmosphere, almost as if the filmmakers themselves lacked faith in their own stylish, atmospheric vision.  A film that could certainly be classified as style over substance, Mickey Keating's Darling is a slow burning descent into madness, being a film that offers very little in terms of narrative while offering an abundance of mood.  Oh, and props to the filmmakers for the always warranted Larry Fessenden cameo.

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