The Darkness (2016)

The Darkness arrives from Blumhouse with a 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the weary dignity of a film that knows exactly what it is. A family drives to the Grand Canyon, a small autistic boy pockets some cursed rocks from a kiva, and the household spends ninety minutes being menaced by a crow, a snake, and a coyote of no fixed address. Kevin Bacon does the heavy lifting. The house does the rest.

The most substantive element here is young Mikey, whose autism is not decoration but plot machinery. He is unafraid of the demons, which makes him the only person who can return the stones and end the event. That is a genuine narrative function, and it earns the film its largest measure of modern sensibility. Elsewhere the ledger is thinner. A Latina healer named Teresa and her granddaughter arrive to smudge the premises, and Anasazi folklore supplies the demon taxonomy, though the film treats both as atmosphere. Nobody reflects on what any of it means.

The daughter's bulimia and the mother's drinking are presented as symptoms of possession, not as occasions for commentary. Casting is diverse in the ordinary way of a working ensemble, with Ming-Na Wen and Alma Martinez on hand, but nothing in the script asks us to notice. There is a Google search scene that explains the mythology in flat, unadorned sentences, which is the closest this film comes to preaching. It is a haunted house picture assembled from parts, competently lit and entirely unremarkable, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about anything.

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