Dark Light

"Between horror, science fiction and fantasy, 'En la oscuridad' ('Dark Light') has everything for fans of the haunted house genre, but with an underlying premise: what wouldn't a woman do to save her only daughter? In the opening sequence we see Annie Know (Jessica Madsen) desperately running around a rural house isolated in the middle of the night, with a shotgun and a torch, while her little daughter Emily (Opal Littleton) hides upstairs. In this frantic game of cat and mouse, we don't know if Annie is crazy enough to attack her own daughter, if she herself is a victim or if she is disturbed by something else. Writer and director Padraig Reynolds is an expert at playing with these ambiguities and making the viewer doubt, as he already demonstrated in his previous feature film (‘Open 24 Hours’, from 2018). Thus, Annie will try to convince us of her innocence and that something truly monstrous has taken away her daughter, while the director gives us clues to think that she is out of her mind and this domestic invasion simply represents the troubled psychological state and sense of alienation of the protagonist. A plus: the monster that goes back to classic movie monsters of horror, is a true achievement of production design."