Lovely, Dark, and Deep – Review
A thriller, not of the psychological bent, but rather of the emotional one, as a young ranger deals with events and situations her training definitely didn’t prepare her for.
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
87 Minutes, Not Rated
Written and Directed by Teresa Sutherland
Synopsis:
Lennon, a new back-country ranger, travels alone through the dangerous wilderness, hoping to uncover the origins of a tragedy that has haunted her since she was a child.
When last I saw Georgina Campbell, she was fleeing through the underground horror hell-scape that was Barbarian, a film I enjoyed for its full embrace of it bat-shit craziness.
Here she is again, dealing with shenanigans bordering on insanity. Manning a remote ranger outpost, Ranger Lennon is obsessed with the search for something, something which becomes clearer to us as the film progresses.
This film is tough to talk about without spoiling so much of what filmmaker Teresa Sutherland seems to be intending for us to discover alongside Lennon, but I can say that the podcasts she listens to occasionally (but not nearly enough… I feel like there was a lot of wasted expositional potential missed here) provide a bit of a backdrop for what might be happening.
People go missing, never to be found, or end up found in areas previously/repeatedly searched, and some sort of conspiracy is claimed… but a conspiracy of what?
It’s the “what” portion of this story that ultimately falls down here. Sutherland gives us an interesting character (and draws a nice performance from Campbell) in Lennon, whose backstory is the clearest thing in the film. The environment (an expansive National Forest) is literally “Lovely, Dark, and Deep,” and lends itself to countless possibilities, and then…
…and then it just. Doesn’t. Gel.
I should like this film, and that’s frustrating. What’s more frustrating is that I don’t HATE the film, either. I’m left in a sort of sensory-deprived state of limbo, waiting to more fully understand and care about the ultimate reveal/non-reveal we end up with.
And that stinks, as a viewer. I mean, a bit of ambiguity can absolutely be a good thing, narratively, allowing the audience to create the bridges between the things we know. But if that ambiguity is too much, if those gaps are too large, it’s not ambiguity, it’s absence, incompleteness…
I like so much of what Lovely, Dark, and Deep is and can be, but not enough to overlook that those things aren’t enough, aren’t complete. There a good movie in this story, and at only 87 minutes, there was plenty of time to develop it.
I wish she had.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep is now available on VOD and stars Georgina Campbell, Nick Blood, and Wai Ching Ho.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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