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Dark Heart
SCREENER/APPROX. 100 MINS/2006/USA UNRATED
SCREENER/APPROX. 100 MINS/2006/USA UNRATED
6.5
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Dark Heart is a film less allusive to horror than to the world of such small town film noir as J.S. Cardone and John Dahl created in films like Outside
Ozona and Red Rock West: all booze, bars, nights on a hazy road and low-key gothic menace. Dahl paved his way into the mainstream with this
type of atmosphere, but he had tighter narrative focus than evidenced in Dark Heart’s boozy sense of wasted reminiscence, sad and bluesy in its
melancholic atmosphere of lives harrowed and resigned to an awful, bleak world. But Dark Heart is knowing; stylish in often hallucinatory
widescreen images, images that sometimes seem shot through an alcohol-induced haze and with a similar sense of direction: indeed, this film
unravels with the speed of a hangover, stylish and accomplished but dull and pointless, often rising to intensely drawn out moments of brutality.
Dark Heart is a masculine film, slow and brooding, its tension simmering in the games men play with fate.
A man gets back to a shitty small town in Bumblefuck, USA. His former girlfriend doesn’t want him anymore and he goes off, desolate; to a bar,
where he runs into an old friend. He’s a veteran of the Gulf War, just back from a tour of duty in Baghdad and times are tough. Pretty soon he’s
getting into some rough stuff and its getting worse. He’s soon in a house, being beaten by four men as a steady rain falls outside. The men begin
to argue amongst each other and his fate lies in the balance. He knows where some money is hidden and these men will do anything to get the
information out of him, including forcing women to do their bidding. After long and due deliberation, they torture him, meditating about what type
of men they have become in doing what they are doing. But they are bad men, and this is a terrible world.
This is contemporary suspense in the manner of film noir, revealing a line of descent from Key Largo through Desperate Hours (both versions) and
even Reservoir Dogs. The set-up here suggests Dark Heart is alluding to the returned veteran subgenre that began with WW2 but became
popular in the wave of returning Vietnam veteran films like Rolling Thunder and The Exterminator. However, the link is tenuous: it is the futility of
war service that is the point here – a veteran confronted with reality of being in the wrong place, unwanted and unwelcome. There is an intriguing
assessment of the similarity between these epochal wars in a convincing scene where a Vietnam vet meets the Iraq vet hero and together they
ruminate on the illusion of wartime heroism. Self-disgust, pride and self-loathing propel this brooding but often vicious film about a man down on
his luck and out of time. Though the film may evoke others, it is distinct and surprisingly engrossing in its stylish veneer, though perhaps not as
convincing in performance as one would hope for.
The sound transfer here is crisp, there being many effects of rain falling on rooves and distant thunder to bring a sense of weather-beaten
conviction to many scenes. In widescreen and with a stylish, rhythmic sense of editing, the film creates a convincing atmosphere but feels
deliberately wasted, exhausted: like many of the people here, revealed by the director in close-in medium shots of sad and weary faces. The DVD
offers no special features of interest and without gore or nudity, the film relies on its grim atmosphere to sell it. It is not without interest, though
its pleasures are ultimately minor: like those of technically polished modern B-movie genre piece – finally becoming an exercise in sustained
brutality, including a harrowing near-rape. Dark Heart is the contemporary film equivalent of disreputable tough-guy fiction, post-Tarantino crime
drama.
Ozona and Red Rock West: all booze, bars, nights on a hazy road and low-key gothic menace. Dahl paved his way into the mainstream with this
type of atmosphere, but he had tighter narrative focus than evidenced in Dark Heart’s boozy sense of wasted reminiscence, sad and bluesy in its
melancholic atmosphere of lives harrowed and resigned to an awful, bleak world. But Dark Heart is knowing; stylish in often hallucinatory
widescreen images, images that sometimes seem shot through an alcohol-induced haze and with a similar sense of direction: indeed, this film
unravels with the speed of a hangover, stylish and accomplished but dull and pointless, often rising to intensely drawn out moments of brutality.
Dark Heart is a masculine film, slow and brooding, its tension simmering in the games men play with fate.
A man gets back to a shitty small town in Bumblefuck, USA. His former girlfriend doesn’t want him anymore and he goes off, desolate; to a bar,
where he runs into an old friend. He’s a veteran of the Gulf War, just back from a tour of duty in Baghdad and times are tough. Pretty soon he’s
getting into some rough stuff and its getting worse. He’s soon in a house, being beaten by four men as a steady rain falls outside. The men begin
to argue amongst each other and his fate lies in the balance. He knows where some money is hidden and these men will do anything to get the
information out of him, including forcing women to do their bidding. After long and due deliberation, they torture him, meditating about what type
of men they have become in doing what they are doing. But they are bad men, and this is a terrible world.
This is contemporary suspense in the manner of film noir, revealing a line of descent from Key Largo through Desperate Hours (both versions) and
even Reservoir Dogs. The set-up here suggests Dark Heart is alluding to the returned veteran subgenre that began with WW2 but became
popular in the wave of returning Vietnam veteran films like Rolling Thunder and The Exterminator. However, the link is tenuous: it is the futility of
war service that is the point here – a veteran confronted with reality of being in the wrong place, unwanted and unwelcome. There is an intriguing
assessment of the similarity between these epochal wars in a convincing scene where a Vietnam vet meets the Iraq vet hero and together they
ruminate on the illusion of wartime heroism. Self-disgust, pride and self-loathing propel this brooding but often vicious film about a man down on
his luck and out of time. Though the film may evoke others, it is distinct and surprisingly engrossing in its stylish veneer, though perhaps not as
convincing in performance as one would hope for.
The sound transfer here is crisp, there being many effects of rain falling on rooves and distant thunder to bring a sense of weather-beaten
conviction to many scenes. In widescreen and with a stylish, rhythmic sense of editing, the film creates a convincing atmosphere but feels
deliberately wasted, exhausted: like many of the people here, revealed by the director in close-in medium shots of sad and weary faces. The DVD
offers no special features of interest and without gore or nudity, the film relies on its grim atmosphere to sell it. It is not without interest, though
its pleasures are ultimately minor: like those of technically polished modern B-movie genre piece – finally becoming an exercise in sustained
brutality, including a harrowing near-rape. Dark Heart is the contemporary film equivalent of disreputable tough-guy fiction, post-Tarantino crime
drama.
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