The line between imitation and homage is sometimes quite blurry. Mickey Keating’s Darling would seem to earn the title of homage, courtesy of its dreamy horror that directly references—but not cloyingly so—The Shining and Repulsion. But its minimalist nature may be a contributing factor to audiences seeing more imitation than homage. The setup, scant as it is, sees a Manhattan brownstone owner (Sean Young) hire a young woman whom she exclusively calls “Darling” (Lauren Ashley Carter) as a live-in caretaker. In their single meeting, the employer discloses that the previous caretaker committed suicide by jumping off the balcony. She somehow forgets to mention that the house is infamously haunted.
Like Polanski’s The Tenant and countless other horror offerings, Darling chronicles a total mental breakdown. But its unnamed protagonist doesn’t seem all there from the get-go. Carter has this angelic look, emphasized by her large doe eyes, but her infrequent blinking makes her creepily off-putting. And she did just accept a job to look after a creepy old house singlehandedly. So, it’s no surprise when she hears incessant tick-tocking and disembodied hushed whispers and becomes obsessed with the one locked door in the house. All signs point to the house bringing out something demented in the girl, but she clearly comes with plenty of her own baggage.
But in terms of narrative content, the film is decidedly spare. In fact, it plays like an exercise in stringing together horror atmospherics. Darling will enter a room and experience a hallucination that may be a premonition, a horrific flashback or something else entirely. She stands immobile in the shower and stares into the camera unblinking as the water washes over her. When she dares to venture out of the house, she constantly glances behind her, whether out of paranoid or legitimate fear, we don’t know. These events, such as they are, so focus on technical homage—on camera setups, intricate framing and the film’s crisp black-and-white—that you could be forgiven for mistaking a startling run-in with a business man (Brian Morvant) in the street as a throwaway scene rather than the key to the film’s murderous denouement.
But for all the film’s callbacks to hard-boiled horror, it has a whimsical style. Keating divides Darling into chapters (even though it has a 78-minute runtime) and uses obtuse titles like “Inferno” as well as the laughable “Thrills!!!” As the film progresses, these title headings not only assume amusing fonts but are the only instance of color (bright neon, no less) throughout the film. And I distinctly heard a girly scream dubbed over the cop who finds a bag of dismembered body parts.
It’s clear that Keating approached Darling more as an exercise than as a traditional horror narrative. It captures a mood in its images and through Carter’s unhinged portrayal, but the story plays out slowly and resolves itself fairly predictably. The occult overtones—first indicated by an incantation etched into the side of her dresser—falls into that category, but the contrast of the supernatural with the frankly prim-looking Carter is perhaps the most successfully unsettling aspect of the film.