The characters of “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” are always unwisely poking their heads and appendages into dark spaces they shouldn’t be. It’s one of the few ways the film’s monsters, bite-size monkeys crossed with the Tooth Fairy (I kid you not), can wreak havoc on this bland, underdeveloped family dumb enough to live in a haunted house.
Seriously, which is more cliche? An oblivious, idiot father (Guy Pearce) who ignores his daughter Sally’s (Bailee Madison) pleas for help from the creatures that go bump in the night or the wise, old groundskeeper who’s always on hand to warn that the basement isn’t safe for children?
Sally comes to live in an ancient mansion her father is restoring along with her father’s girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes). Sally doesn’t particularly like Kim, and although she seems scared of the new setting and being away from her mom, she begins to explore and makes a concerted effort to break into a sealed up grate in a hidden basement. From inside the grate, Sally hears voices calling out to be her friend, but we know better that the monsters have long ago devoured the house’s previous caretaker over a century ago.
Luckily, their greatest weakness is the light, and the film contrives a way to let the girl in this contemporary film use a Polaroid instant camera. It also means that every encounter with the monsters will surely be shrouded in darkness and will not be scary but merely startling. So to keep up the creepy factor, we get a really good glimpse of the little critters early on in the film. They’re also given annoying hissing voices to provide a loose motivation for the monsters.
Suffice it to say, the buggers lose their mystique long before the climax, and the last 20 minutes gets awfully loud and screechy.
If “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” had more to go on, I may have been kinder to the thought that at least the thing terrorizing the house is not just one giant monster or demon. The film is produced by Guillermo Del Toro, and the monsters in this film remind me slightly of a flurry of creatures in the second “Hellboy” film.
But the performances are phoned in, and the character development is limited to a few fill-in-the-blank details about what these characters even do or why they’re here. Nothing sets them apart as interesting figures, and the father has more moments of numbskullery than quite a few characters I’ve seen this year. My favorite came when the groundskeeper staggers out of the hidden basement bloody and with scissors jutting out of his shoulder, and he has the nerve to believe the poor guy stumbled.
2 stars
1 thought on “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”