“What if a ballroom-dancing samurai serial killer?” It’s an audacious concept, and in her feature debut, the psychological thriller Dark Feathers: Dance of the Geisha, writer-director-producer Crystal J. Huang, with co-director Nicholas Ryan, clearly shows some flair for drama. But despite the distinct, original vision, Huang’s charges are unable to execute this bold premise—with a few notable exceptions.
A longtime dancer and character actress, Huang plays Kate, a competitive ballroom dancer whose partners have a mysterious habit of turning up dead. After her most recent partner jumps off a building in front of her, detective Remy (Sex and the City’s Gilles Marini) wants to take on this strange case. Coincidentally, Remy’s partner Amelia (Ukrainian dancer Karina Smirnoff) is a dance instructor who happens to have Kate as one of her students.
It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Naturally, the dance sequences are the strongest scenes in the film, from the glamorous opening duet to a pointed solo from Smirnoff. Huang and Smirnoff are dancer-actors whose strengths play off each other nicely, Huang a cool, icy technician and Smirnoff a more fiery, emotional performer, and their complementary temperaments make good dramatic foils for each other.
Unfortunately, the screenplay, by Jin Yao and Daniel Benton, from a story by Huang, is far less convincing in its convoluted crime drama than in its dreamlike dance numbers. The synthesis of samurai and ballroom dancing never comes together, though one key early sequence comes close to selling this wild scenario: when Kate visits her samurai mentor, she is asked to undergo a test of fitness, which involves taking shole walnuts and splitting them with a certain part of her anatomy. The accomplishment happens off-screen, of course, but you do hear it, and it’s a remarkable scene that breathes life into the film for a moment. But how do you follow that act?
Still, the terpsichorean milieu makes up for line readings that are not always perfect. Aside from a cameo from Michael Madsen, the actors seem largely cast for their dancing ability, and if line If the cast is not made up of seasoned actors, it is made up of seasoned performers, performers who thrill in the drama of the body and the sweep of lines in motion.
The San Francisco setting and vanity-project air might lead some to suspect Dark Feathers is a ballroom dancing version of The Room, and frankly some of the choices are as odd (and in that one case, inspired) as that unlikely auteurist masterpiece. So it’s too bad that an aesthetic which focuses on the sweep of body lines gets lost in establishing shots that deploy a wide-angle lens that distorts plumb lines. Though perhaps that visual distortion is a metaphor for a criminal mastermind who has taken the traditions she practices and distorts their inherent morals, using them for evil purposes.
There are other inconsistencies: at one dance contest, a rival dancer appears to sign autographs with a pen whose cap is on. In a flashback to the car accident that killed one of Kate’s partners, a road sign on a mountain decline helpfully points out, “Icy,” even though the asphalt is bone dry.
All this might have been forgotten if the script were more coherent. Some intriguing relationships are set up but don’t pay off; in a 2023 interview Huang credits a team of writers with bringing her story to life, but they didn’t do justice to her ideas.
That title metaphor is apt: Dark Feathers is seemingly lightweight, but carries a sinister tone. The one thing that remains is the dancing, and even as the plot loses steam, one is grateful that the dancers remain compelling as physical beings. If Huang and her crew could consistently maintain that competitive drama off the dancefloor, you wouldn’t turn your eyes away. So the film remains an intriguing and ambitious, but failed, curiosity.
Photo courtesy of Hannover House
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