REVIEW - DARK TOUCH

A lame duck art-horror movie from the talented French director Marina de Van; her talents are put to poor use in this hoary scarer. It's a damn wonder she's working from her own script and her own concept, as it is wholly unsuited to her style, which evidences itself in striking, though somewhat stale framing, and her own dark touch, steering the film into increasingly grim territory. But even this is lacking in imagination. The opening credits come to a close and we immediately divine that young Niamh is possessed of a dangerous power of which she is in little control. She is able to teleport objects upon crying, or to cause significant structural damage to buildings, and with perpetually injurious consequences to others. Quite why she has been cursed with this ability, de Van never seeks to explain; quite what triggers it, she alludes to frequently and rather noisily, which erodes what emotional power it might have wielded were it disclosed with more tact and sensitivity to story and tone. Either her handling of the cast or the work of the casting crew has gone majorly awry (perhaps both), but I'm drawn to suggesting it's the former - there's a bludgeoning woodenness to the performances, self-consciously choreographed and proclaiming the most bizarre lines of dialogue - dramatically, individual scenes are extremely shoddy. de Van is indubitably more confident when given the chance to go batshit, or at least as batshit as she'll let herself, and a few of the film's sequences of violence take a more direct route toward affecting their audience. Still, in context, they too fall foul of a frankly stupid internal logic - Dark Touch makes no sense even with the most cursory analysis, and often seems driven more by de Van's impulses than anything else. Her artistic impulses have guided her more reliably in the past. Here, they feel more like commercial impulses, and misplaced ones at that.