Super Dark Times (2017)
Directed by Kevin Phillips
No — Super Dark Times is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Super Dark Times arrives in 1996 upstate New York with a katana, a bag of stolen marijuana, and no visible interest in the cultural conversations of the present day.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is predominantly white and the film does not foreground diverse casting as a thematic or marketing element. Any minority presence is incidental rather than a marker of representation casting.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes in the plot. The story focuses entirely on teenage male friendship, jealousy, and violence.
Female characters exist mainly as objects of teenage desire or victims of male violence, without a feminist critique or agenda. The film does not engage with gender politics in a modern woke sense.
Race is not a visible theme, conflict, or commentary in the film. The narrative is concerned with guilt, paranoia, and adolescent breakdown, not racial consciousness.
There is no environmental or climate-related content in the film. The setting and plot are entirely focused on personal tragedy and psychological deterioration.
The film contains no critique of capitalism, wealth inequality, or economic systems. Its conflicts are interpersonal and psychological.
There is no body-positive messaging or celebration of diverse body types. The film does not engage with body image as a theme.
Mental instability and psychopathic behavior are portrayed as narrative horror elements, not as neurodivergence in the modern advocacy sense. No neurodivergent identity or community is represented.
The film is set in 1996 but does not revise or reinterpret historical events for ideological purposes. It is a fictional period thriller, not a work of revisionist history.
The film does not pause to deliver moral lectures or didactic social commentary. It prioritizes mood, dread, and psychological fallout over preaching.
Why it received this score
Super Dark Times arrives in 1996 upstate New York with a katana, a bag of stolen marijuana, and no visible interest in the cultural conversations of the present day. Kevin Phillips opens on a wounded deer, moves to two boys rating their female classmates in a yearbook, and proceeds to a secluded park where an argument over weed ends with a blade in a boy's neck. What follows is aftermath: nightmares, insomnia, a mutilated corpse, a Christmas tree, a killer who keeps the sword. There is no thesis here beyond the slow corrosion of a friendship, and the film never reaches for one.
The cast is white, the setting is white, and nobody remarks on it. Race does not enter the frame as theme or tension. Neither does class, though these boys have military brothers and absent parents and a suburb full of nothing to do. The film has no economic argument to make and does not pretend otherwise. The girls exist to be rated, desired, or killed. Allison survives, and the closing shot of three parallel lines on her neck is a horror beat, not a gender critique. No character is gay, or coded as such, or discussed in those terms at all.
Mental collapse is treated as monster material, which is the oldest tradition in the genre and not a modern advocacy position. Josh's spiral is dread, not diagnosis. There is no sermon, no lesson, no pause for the audience to be corrected. The camera watches, the synth hums, and the film ends without instructing anyone about how to feel. By the standards of contemporary social consciousness it registers a clean zero, and it seems entirely at peace with that verdict. A mood piece, then, and an honest one.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Teenagers Zach and Josh have been best friends their whole lives, but when a gruesome accident leads to a cover-up, the secret drives a wedge between them and propels them down a rabbit hole of escalating paranoia and violence.
Questions about Super Dark Times
Is Super Dark Times woke?
No — Super Dark Times is not woke, scoring 0 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Super Dark Times have any woke elements?
No. All 10 markers score zero.
How does Super Dark Times compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #281 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.