In Darkness (2018)

In Darkness arrives from 2018 with the quiet confidence of a thriller that believes it has a secret. Natalie Dormer plays Sofia McKendrick, a blind pianist in Maida Vale who overhears a murder, accepts a USB drive, and descends into a London underworld of Serbian war criminals, treacherous siblings, and a detective who spends most of the running time arriving late. The film was co-written by its star, which explains the generous allocation of screen time to her character's interior life and the shower scenes that follow. It is competent. It is moody. It ends with a twist that reframes everything, in the manner of a film that has studied its betters closely and taken diligent notes.

For all its grim machinery, the picture carries almost no social agenda. Dormer's Sofia drives a revenge plot with a sexual agency that reads as mildly progressive, and she co-wrote the thing, which earns a modest nod in that direction. Beyond this, the film declines to lecture. The Bosnian backdrop supplies atrocity and ethnic grievance but no commentary on either. A wealthy war criminal anchors the villainy, yet the script never turns its gaze toward capital. There is nudity, deployed for the erotic logic of the genre, not as a statement about bodies. Blindness is a plot device, revealed at the last as an elaborate deception, which undercuts any claim to genuine representation. The cast is white, the themes are vengeance and betrayal, and the moral universe is one of personal score-settling.

What we have, then, is a throwback. A nasty little revenge picture with a famous lead, a modest budget, and a UK opening week of one thousand five hundred and fifty pounds across ten theaters. The critical reception was mixed, the box office was worse, and the cultural footprint is negligible. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a twist, and in the current climate that passes for a relief.