Review: ‘Out of Darkness’ Reveals 45,000 BCE as No Picnic  – The Village Voice

The Paleolithic Age constitutes more than 99% of tool-making human history, but movies usually ignore it — you could, after all, throw your back out trying to conceive how early humans talked and behaved back then, based on the fossilized junk they left behind. The small, not-so-new (2022) Brit film Out of Darkness makes a game try: Set somewhere wintery and northern (shot in Scotland), it follows a small band of Homo erectus-oids as they come ashore in the wilderness and start looking for food and shelter. Then they get hunted, and picked off, just like naive modern vacationers — who always go to a “remote cabin” — in any one of hundreds of streaming horror indies.

First-time director Andrew Cumming tries to keep it tough-minded and realistic, and in the process bleeds the movie of invention and fun — inadvertently revealing, you could conclude, why so few films are set in 45,000 BCE. Speaking a guttural, subtitled argot devised for the film, the band’s burly hot-headed leader (Chuku Modu) is all about being the head honcho, commanding his shaky younger brother (Kit Young), his pregnant partner (Iola Evans), and young son (Luna Mwezi). Tagging along is an old-timer (Arno Lüning) and a stray teenager (Safia Oakley-Green), neither of whom is anyone’s priority. Naturally, Oakley-Green’s clear-eyed Arya Stark–ish gamine is our heroine, as the men fail to protect the group against whatever large, fast, bloodthirsty thing is hunting them in the night.

There’s not much else going on; unlike Jean-Jacques Annaud’s risibly ambitious 1981 epic, Quest for Fire, there’s no comedy relief or sex, just a lot of lurking and searching in the darkness (which is, despite the title, where we are most of the time). Oakley-Green’s plucky Final Girl does have her #MeToo crises, secretly hiding a stone shiv under a pillow once she gets her period, because of which, she’s told in no uncertain terms, she’ll now be “of use.” You’d surmise as much if you’re imagining, like Cumming and screenwriter Ruth Greenberg, what situations such a girl, with lovely 21st-century dental work, would face back in the day.

Not to mention, the issue of necessary cannibalism comes up with barely a shrug. That life was cheap might have been the Paleolithic reality on the ground, but it leaves the filmmakers far fewer dramatic opportunities than chances to scour the highlands for crisp, rocky scenery. The movie is not ultimately the horror film it’s being marketed as, it’s more like a cave-dwelling slasher film, with a late-in-the-game swivel toward interspecies tolerance and understanding that doesn’t quite dovetail with the shredded bodies. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

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