Once the realization of what writer/director Tracy Lucca is trying to do in Dark State sets in, it moves far past the point of no return and into the arena of the genuinely irresponsible. Ostensibly, the film is about a journalist who delves deeply into what seems to be the disappearance of a promising, young actress and a conspiracy involving the identities of the men who were with her at the time of a car accident, in which she was the sole survivor. The hints that Lucca is going in the direction of a conspiracy held by real, often dangerous people are dropped early on, but until they become explicit, the experience of watching the film is to be in a state of denial about the fact that they will go to that place.
They do. The conspiracy — which, of course, turns out to be the barely hidden truth — revolves around the belief that the elite forces of Hollywood, the United States government and a globalist agenda that also somehow includes serial killers and (you guessed it) child predators are at the center of every accursed thing that has happened in history. The movie treats this conspiracy-turned-fact as some third-act revelation. We get the picture almost immediately upon Alicia’s (K. O’Rourke) presentation of the evidence to her boss/eventual love interest, Rusty (Nicholas Baroudi).
According to the screenplay, Alicia is a journalist with some degree of talent. Another reporter even warns Alicia not to limit her own promise, yet the presumption of Alicia’s talent here doesn’t follow through into reality. She claims to stand up for truth, but leading questions are the kind that guide her toward the identities of the three men who were in the car with the missing actress. They included a self-professed serial killer (a fictional one whose death sentence was commuted by a certain, very real, death-penalty-supporting former Governor of Texas), the heir to a big-name company very much on the up and up and a former general in the U.S. Army (who was also supposed to have co-written The Satanic Bible with Anton LaVey.
How, asks Alicia, were these men and the actress together in this car? Why, ponders Rusty, haven’t other news outlets reported on their identities? Whom, pleads the audience, can we talk to about stopping this idiocy in its tracks?
It is possible to build a mystery under these circumstances, of course. Any subject, in the hands of the right creative minds to finesse it, has potential, and believing otherwise is the kind of overt cynicism that just drags down everything. There is, though, a limit to the kind of questions that a movie and its makers can ask before one begins to wonder about the sanity of the questioner.
The film enters into a kind of exasperating formula: Alicia makes incremental progress in the investigation into the disappearance, the life of the actress (whom she knew casually many years ago), the involvement of the men and the shadowy figures in all of their lives (such as a pair, played by Constantine Maroulis and Melissa Connell, who lurk in the background of the plot to discuss their own progress). She receives a series of increasingly dramatic revelations that slowly chip away at the mystery. Rinse and repeat.
As a mystery, then, the film is as basic as they come, and in terms of style and performance, that bodes true, as well. In a larger sense, the reprehensible politics at play are far more troubling and less forgivable than creative or storytelling limitations. On the subject of the “deep state” conspiracy, Dark State (the title an obnoxious attempt to distance itself from the real phrase) not only barters in the irresponsible but buys into it, as well.
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