Such a frustrating disappointment

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Libby Day (Charlize Theron) has trouble remembering events on the night her family was murdered. Her testimony put her brother Ben (Tye Sheridan) in jail. He was accused of molesting an eleven year old girl and he was a Satan worshiper hanging out with the wrong crowd. Years after the deed, Libby is running low on funds and contacts the Kill Club who want to investigate the murders. They believe Ben is innocent. Libby is reluctant to help. As she starts to look at the material, she too is sucked into the mystery.The film uses flashbacks to recreate what happened in the past. It drops clues, in fact it drops enough clues, that you have more suspects than a half dozen Scooby-Doo episodes...including Ben. The film is based on a popular novel by the same name. It takes place in Kansas and moves at a pace that strings you along as the clues and flashbacks ooze out slowly.Guide: F-bomb. Sex. Near stripper nudity.

I just read the book and decided to watch the movie, thinking that with this strong compelling story the film would be great. Wrong. It was so flat and boring it made me forget how good the story really was. I didn't have any problem with the casting (especially with young Ben Day, I think he was really good) but the whole tone of the film was stiff and had me saying "whatever...". The music wasn't good, the characters were so one dimensional and what really bugged me was the flashback scenes and the fact that there was no other suspects. In the book you keep changing your mind about who's the killer every chapter but in the movie it's pretty clear from the start. The flashbacks did not portray what was really going on, so when we slowly uncover the truth we do not really care... Even the scene of the murders were plain and boring. I don't understand how could someone take this story and turn it into this. So disappointed. I know that in order to make a movie you have to cut a lot of things out of a book, but it feels like it lost its great character, their emotions and the mood. Finally I forgot to mention that the casting for today's Ben Day character was so wrong.

While the book was at least okay, the film is simply uninspired and doesn't explore the material in a way that the more or less complex story seems coherent and interesting. The psychological abysses of the characters are ignored in the script, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult, being the talented actors they are, definitely had the potential to save the weak story adaption, but I was surprised to see their acting halfhearted and wooden.

From 2015, "Dark Places" stars Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks, and Corey Stoll in an adaptation of a novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl).Theron is Libby Day, one of two living survivors of the mass murder of her family in 1985 in Kansas. Where else - it's where the murders in In Cold Blood took place. The other survivor is her brother Ben (Stoll), a teen at the time, who has been in prison for the last 25 years for the murders, due to what she told the police.Libby is a cold, closed-off human being, understandably, given what she went through as a child; she cashed in on the murders and never worked. As a child people sent her money, and she also wrote a book -- well, her name was on it and she was paid, but she states that she never even read it. Now that she's an adult, she has $412 left and has never had a job. So when she's approached by a crime club called the Kill Club, which discusses and works on famous murder cases, she takes their money to make an appearance.Though she insists her brother is guilty, Libby takes more money to actually investigate for the club's president (Hoult). It has to be done right away because storage problems in the state building mean that cases more than ten years old will be destroyed in a few weeks.Flashbacks recreate the circumstances surrounding the murders, showing her mother (Hendricks) trying to hold onto their farm despite poverty, her alcoholic husband who shows up for money, Ben being accused of child molestation and of practicing Satanism, and Ben's relationship with Diondra (Chloe Grace Moretz), who seems to be the town bad girl.Slowly Libby is able to put the pieces together and learns the stunning truth.I don't understand the vilification of this movie - what has it ever done to anyone? A 26% fresh on rottentomatoes.com. Was it Hate Charlize Day or what? This is a terrific, suspenseful film that will keep you guessing right to the end.Theron gives a frosty performance, right on for this isolated, unfriendly woman who has cut herself off from the world and people. She wears a baseball cap throughout most of the film; we don't really get to see her true beauty unless it's off. There is a book called "Flesh and Fantasy" which has a chapter on How to Win an Oscar. One way is for a beautiful movie star to make herself look bad, as Theron did in Monster. She prefers to make films that are not about her gorgeous looks, and this was one.Christina Hendricks does a great job as Libby's downtrodden mother - she looks and acts defeated - a far cry from being one of the glamorous stars of "Mad Men."For fans of this genre, and I gather for people who haven't read the book, I think this is a very well done film that deserves to be seen as a rental or on Amazon streaming.