The engrossing and atmospheric coming-of-age thriller Super Dark Times captures much of the wonder and terror of growing up. In his feature film debut, director Kevin Phillips’s background in cinematography is clear: Super Dark Times’ strongest features are the constantly creeping camera, pacey tracking shots, utilization of space and steadily building sense of dread. Though the film shuffles around cinematic tropes (a bloody autumn tale of the perils of growing up), the film’s camerawork, well-established setting (a small, once-industrial town in the mid-‘90s) and skillful editing make it crackle with life and menace.
Zach (Owen Campbell) and Josh (Charlie Tahan) are best friends in the fringes of their high school’s social hierarchy. They do not necessarily want to be more popular, but they’re very horny; a little notoriety may help them get some girls, which is a far better outlet for their sexual hormones than the scrambled porn they stare at in Zach’s basement. Specifically, they pine after Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino), the epitome of the girl next door. Their run-of-the-mill teenage adventures—such as slicing waterfilled milk cartons with Josh’s brother’s katana—are quickly disrupted by a terrible accident in which one of their friends, Daryl (Max Talisman), dies. When Josh finds himself holding a bloody sword that just killed his friend, the boys panic and hide Daryl’s body in the forest.
With this, Super Dark Times transforms from a simple story of growing up to one of increasing paranoia and violence. Zach and Josh become distant, their shared knowledge of Daryl’s demise a psychological anchor. Allison makes it known she is infatuated with Zach, further driving a wedge into the boys’ friendship. Plus, maybe Josh liked the feeling of extinguishing a life; he and Zach are the sort of boys targeted by bullies, so perhaps Josh enjoys the role reversal of being physically dominant. Zach fears his dearest friend may be slowly turning into a bloodthirsty killing machine.
Their shared secret, their mutual crush on Allison and the vagaries of being hyper-emotional, hyper-sensitive teenage boys in a provincial town all build up to a crushing, gory third act. Super Dark Times, like It Follows, is made all the more thrilling by its strong sense of place. It joins the pantheon of films that point to orderly life in small towns or suburbs (Super Dark Times’ unspecified setting could be either, but the area is moderately affluent, like a distant satellite of Philadelphia) as the core of U.S.-American experience while identifying this core as depraved and violent. It is precisely the façade of order and normality camouflaging our fallen-ness that allows people to be monstrous and cruel behind closed doors. Daryl going missing puts the town on edge, but only because it shatters the false sense of security established by the manicured lawns and tidy streets.
In the opening act, Super Dark Times veers a bit too near “Stranger Things”—boys on bikes discussing comic books—but quickly corrects itself into its own lane. The film could still broadly be called Spielbergian, but it hews closer to John Carpenter in its Halloween-like setting and release date and in its social criticism disguised as bloody thriller. The film is not about the eclipse of childhood innocence (à la Spielberg) so much as it is an allegory of the sinister in the familiar. While our current social and political order peddles fear of the outsider and the unknown, this film loudly proclaims that the truly dangerous threats are those already inside the system.
Super Dark Times is subtle in this argument, and it operates just as well as a mindless genre film: fast-paced and excitingly photographed with an energetic camera that is always slowly pushing into the action. Phillips certainly knows how to capture a scene, and the interiors feel authentic for the ‘90s setting. Phillips is also an expert at meeting the standard tropes of his genre while infusing them with enough novelty to make the film fresh.
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