Wordiezett So much average

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Alex da Silva Adelle (Maria Bello) and her daughter, Sarah (Sophie Stuckey) visit James (Sean Bean) on the Welsh coast. When Sarah is presumed drowned, Adelle does not give up the fight to find her daughter alive......and who is the strange girl, Ebril (Abigail Stone) who suddenly appears...?The story is a scary one with an original plot, if a little complicated at times, especially near the end. But the story will scare you if you are wanting to be scared. You won't guess the end as there are several twists and just when you think it's all over......it's not.......and then it's still not......and then again.... It's definitely one to watch again. Not sure about the effectiveness of sheep as a scary animal form, though. There are a few loose ends that are left unresolved but so what.

Theo Robertson THE DARK has a lot going for it . It's directed by John Fawcett the man who made cult werewolf movie GINGER SNAPS and stars Sean Bean . It also has an interesting premise of a couple who's young daughter hasdrowned which while not original - Everyone remembers DON'T LOOK NOW - has a lot of potential . Unfortunately this is a film that proves unless you have a well structured and compelling screenplay then all the other aspects of movie making are redundant The problem with THE DARK is the longer it continues the more confused everything becomes . According to the trivia section this is the first film in history to involve the concept of " Annwyn " an underworld from Welsh mythology . I'd certainly never heard of this legend and I doubt if many people watching the film had done so either . Worse still it becomes obvious that most people who made the film don't know either . To hide this fact Fawcett starts throwing every cliché he can think of to disguise this fact and the audience have to endure startling sound effects/ noises , dark interiors of houses , apparitions and < insert our own cliché here > , so much so that you'll be at a loss what's going on long before the end credits There is another major flaw and that is the " monsters " in the movie are sheep ! No I'm not making this up , I'm being deadly serious . Some films have aliens as villains , or spiders , or rats or any other skin crawling creatures you can think of while THE DARK has fluffy , four legged mammals famous for chewing grass and running away when anyone goes near them as objects of terror . It might seem amusing to see people being trampled by sheep but everything about the movie is constructed , framed and written in overly dead pan dramatics that it's impossible to raise a smile at this ridiculous plot turn To be fair THE DARK is a fairly good film on a technical level . Both the cinematography and editing are impressive as is the sound mix so I've awarded it 4/10 . The down side is that I'm probably giving it a higher mark than it deserves since the storyline incidents are incomprehensible and has been stated most of the audience will be totally confused as to what's going on . Let's hope this is the last film to revolve around Annwyn . To be blunt a film about Ann Robinson would be more interesting

simon_hugh_music Look, I would just like to add my voice to this. I wrote the novel, Sheep. The film is 'adapted' from my book the exact same way a pile of rubble is 'adapted' from a house. My book is a slow, serious thriller on the theme of contamination, of land, of food, of livestock, and of minds. It is about ritual purity, conformism and the category-error that is literal biblical belief. It is, in short, about something. None (NONE!) of the filmmakers had read it, they just had a script based on another script, and were highly indignant when my agent suggested they actually read the original.The film takes some of the visual gestures that animate the book (sheep diseases, religious mania etc), but then scoops out all the surrounding connective tissue, everything that makes the book make sense, replacing it with some kind of pulp which looks to me as if the writer was shaken violently awake in the middle of the night and asked to regurgitate the story lines from the last five horror movies he had seen, except his notes got all scrambled up - the result being a sort of plot-pudding, full of screaming and running about and unexplained (unexplainable) twists. No disrespect to anyone, and I know what sort of pressures the screenwriter was under, but the film does not, in any sense, 'adapt' Sheep, the novel. Sheep is a careful, thoughtful book, with a meticulously worked plot. It is also (I am informed) scary (one reviewer said it was the only thing he had ever read which did actually scare him), which the film of course, despite its most strenuous efforts, fails completely to be. The book is not about some vague Disneyfied version of Welsh mythology (nice and safe and distant in these troubled times), it is about Christianity, the Bible: about what happens when religion turns to madness. The scariness is in the waiting, the hinting, the accumulation of detail, drip by drip. It is about fearing, dreading, while something unfolds which cannot be understood until it is too late. I may not have succeeded in any of this, but I was trying. The film just flaps about from one random thing to another, papering over the cracks with tiresome 'shock' effects and Maria Bello screaming.Copies of Sheep are hard to track down now without paying a lot of money, but I would love it if the people who were disappointed in the film were to read the book. Please don't judge the book (or any of my other books) because you didn't like The Dark: there is almost nothing connecting the two things. Give the book a try: you'll be surprised.Thanks for your time.

Coventry In spite of the tepid title, the involvement of some acclaimed Hollywood names and fancy production values, "The Dark" sounded like a potentially good and old-fashioned atmospheric horror/ghost thriller even for the more experienced and 'developed' horror buff to enjoy. To my knowledge, not too many genre movies deal with Welsh mythology and, since I'm a sucker for these ancient folklore tales, I thought this movie deserved a fair chance. Anyway, it couldn't possibly be worse than "Silent Hill"; that other recently released excuse for a horror flick with Sean Bean where his daughter goes missing. Well, it's not worse but definitely almost equally bad! Aside from the cool rudimentary folklore plot, "The Dark" is full of dreary clichés, false scares, confusing red herrings, tedious padding and wannabe suspenseful elements that are shamelessly stolen from other recent (Asian) ghost chillers such as "Dark Water" and particularly "The Ring". The script is adapted from a novel by Simon Maginn and – without even having read it – I already know for sure the book must be a dozen times better than the film. It is more than obvious that the producers wanted to cash in on the success of other films. There's basically nothing wrong with that, but they were naive enough to believe nobody would notice the blatant similarities. Some sequences, like the ones filmed outside and near the cliff, look exactly like the footage of "The Ring". The production seemingly never develops a personality and near the end director John Fawcett ("Ginger Snaps") loses complete grip and control over the subject matter, resulting in a needlessly convoluted and infuriatingly confusing climax.Continuously bickering mother Adele (Maria Bello) and early teenage daughter Sarah (Sophie Stuckey) arrive in a really remote area in Wales to rejoin their estranged father James (Sean Bean). Sarah disrespects her mother and wants to stay with her dad, but the place literally bathes in an ominous aura and feels haunted with the tragic events of the past. After witnessing some sheep committing a strange and somewhat disturbing act of ritual suicide, Sarah disappears in the water. During her search for the girl, Adele learns more about the local legend of "Annwyn" – the place where people go to die – and about a priest who encouraged an entire town's community to commit suicide by jumping off the cliff in order to get back his own deceased daughter Ebril. All this happened more than 60 years ago, but Adele is convinced there's a connection with the vanishing of her daughter. She's proved right when the reincarnation of Ebril seeks contact with them. Admittedly the whole Annwyn myth itself is compelling and the few sequences with the sheep running amok are oddly unsettling (if you happen to have a phobia for sheep, avoid this film or nightmares are guaranteed!), but overall "The Dark" is just another lackluster horror accomplishment. Fawcett makes the terrible – and typically Asian ghost story - mistake of using an overload of eerie noises (opening doors, whispering child voices, distant Morse code…) without ever showing any actually bloody horror scenes or shocking imagery. After struggling through a couple of these repeated mistakes, the film becomes very boring and then the finale is just miserable beyond words. The acting performances are amiable – particularly Sean Bean impresses, playing the good guy for a change – and the location spotters did a tremendous job.