Added without any announcement to the Netflix catalog on June 22, In Darkness joins the many thrillers of the platform; Neither good nor bad, Anthony Byrne's fourth feature film has undeniable qualities, but which suffocate in a scenario seen and reviewed, without audacity or surprise.
All the ingredients of a good thriller are there: a blind woman as the main character (Sofia), a neighbor who hides heavy secrets (Veronique), secret agents and a gang of villains. A little reductive and yet The Dark Part can not help but follow a terribly classic scenario, which chains revelations and action scenes. Sofia (played by Nathalie Dormer, best known for her role in Game of Thrones), a talented blind pianist, witnesses the suicide of her neighbor (Emily Ratajkowski); She thus finds herself embarked on a case full of secrets and reversals. Everything unfolds irremediably, with a suspense more or less present according to the different revelations, but everything remains of a fairly uniform level.
We must still give La Part Obscure a very well done production: the mastery of sound plays a lot throughout the film, as an omnipresent and essential element to the narrative. Sofia being blind, her audition is a key element of the script and accompanies her at every moment. The viewer is also guided by the sound qualities of the film, from powerful sounds to well-adjusted music. We could almost follow the film only thanks to the sounds and words of the characters, which allows a very powerful immersion in the universe of the main character.
Faced with this mastery, one might think that photography would be sloppy and visual biases almost non-existent: and this is where La Part Obscure catches off guard, by repeatedly proposing very beautiful scenes that, if they are not revolutionary, perfectly follow the universe of the film. The light effects are very well conducted, with yellow and blue shades as well as shadowy moments that illustrate very well Sofia's blindness and impressions (especially the fight scenes, which are filmed as Chinese shadows and accentuate the violence of the sequences).
But is good cinema just about "doing things right"? Is it enough to make beautiful photographs and have a good sound mix to be able to talk about a good film? Cinema is also made to dare, create, invent, innovate constantly, leave room for madness and emotions, to let characters and images speak. The Dark Part shows no originality and does not revolutionize the genre, far from it. Unfortunately, more and more films produced by Netflix, which benefit from large means of production, tend to lock themselves into a genre without going beyond its limits and to remain wisely within the limits of a cinema that is neither excellent nor audacious, in its form as in its substance.
The direction is not everything, especially when it does not revolutionize the genre: The Dark Part joins, with a little regret, the meanders of the Netflix catalog, because of a scenario too weak and unambitious. Too bad for a film that could have exploited much better the suspense and the reversals of situation, with beautiful photography and a mastery of sound. We have neither a good nor a bad time, but Anthony Byrne's fourth feature film will surely quickly fall into oblivion.
