AND SOON THE DARKNESS

What does modern horror have against female friends lately, eh? Wolf Creek (come on, the guy hardly figured); The Human Centipede: First Sequence (where a guy figured rather too much); Martyrs…now And Soon the Darkness (2010), yet another cautionary tale about girls going places, even in pairs.

The film makes no bones about where it's heading: the first scene is a standard, screaming-woman-tied-up affair where a guy comes along and electrocutes her into submission. However it quickly departs from this (thankfully) and moves us three months along. We're in Argentina, and two American girls, Ellie (Odette Yustman) and Stephanie (Amber Heard) are cycling into a small town (past a 'missing' poster of Camila, the girl from the opening scene) where, eyeballed by all the suitably suspicious-looking local men, they're due to pass one night before moving on to their last stop and then home. Deciding to make the best of their last night, they head to the local bar where they encounter fellow Westerner Michael (Karl Urban) and a local guy, Luca (Luis Sabatini). Despite Ellie getting tanked up, dancing to that awful Divinyls song and following Michael into the toilets to put in a good word for her friend, they manage to get home in one piece - well, Stephanie leaves first, and is woken by Ellie and Luca outside the hotel room where, it seems, Luca is getting a tad rough.

A thwarted Luca batters the bedroom door so hard that he knocks the plug of the alarm clock out of the wall though, so the girls miss their one and only bus the next day. Never mind, they're suitably over their ordeal to head to a nearby beauty spot for some bikini-wearing - but a brief quarrel about boys sees Steph heading off solo again, and this time Ellie really disappears. Together with the help of the mysterious American Michael, Stephanie starts trying to track down her friend.

For a large section of the rest of the film, I felt like I was watching Hostel all over again: an initial, horrifying scene is followed up with young Americans abroad, having a good time - until someone goes missing, and the remaining parties have to struggle with a language barrier, locals who seems to be 'in the know' and a complicit police force, before eventually being endangered themselves. To be fair, it's not a bad horror theme - we've probably all been abroad and at some point felt utterly out of our depth - but if the Hostel formula is going to be repeated, then above all, one thing seems important: do we empathise with the protagonists or not?

Here, I'd say I sympathise somewhat. They start off as completely ditzy birds abroad, ignorant of what is going on around them and rather childish - not the sorts of characters you find yourself caring much about. The film holds back on just setting them up and then having them tortured, though - despite that early clue, this is quite a slow-moving film, and not merely a 'torture porn' film, so there is time to appreciate Stephanie's predicament. That said, it does stumble in several places: it falls back on predictable clichés, and the lead performances - though okay - did not communicate all that perhaps they should (and the American actors did not hold their own against the Latino actors, which included the talented Adriana Barraza of Drag Me to Hell).

Where the film does come into its own is in its locations. It's undeniably well-made and shot in some places that just work brilliantly on-camera: they look for all the world like post-apocalyptic landscapes. Even if the cat-and-mouse conclusion isn't your idea of a good time, there is a lot here which looks impressive.

And Soon the Darkness is standard fare in many respects and takes its place in an already rather saturated genre, but it has some nice touches - especially visually - and it does manage to be quite tense in places, even if you know you will be put through a certain familiar gamut. Whether you choose to do so depends on how your tolerance for this sort of horror has been tested of late.

The quality of the picture is good, with rich blacks, crisp, warm, realistic tones and plenty of justice done to the picturesque surroundings. The sound is clearly audible with good levels, and you have the usual option of Dolby 5.1 or stereo. For extras, there is a scene selection, deleted scenes, and the original trailer - as well as trailers for The Tourist, Brighton Rock and The Last Exorcism.

Review by Keri O'Shea