Pretty Good

It is a performances centric movie

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

One of Keating's and Lauren Ashley Carter's BEST! Atmospheric, mysterious, and frightening. I love this movie and STILL want to know what's behind the door at the end of the hall!!

Wow. I had low expectations about this movie because of the star rating. I was sorely mistaken. Definitely 8/10 movie. This is an amazing movie. Very terrifying and beautifully done. Many jump scares that are not your normal jump scares. The story of a mid twenties woman who is house sitting. The house is supposedly haunted. But this movie takes a different turn altogether. Without spoiling anything, everything is not as expected.

This is the kind of love or hate flicks because it's a slow mover and not that much is happening but it do has the love or hate arty gravy.Being shot in black and white this is already a reason for many to turn it off but for me that's a reason to keep watching because the red stuff looks more darker in black and white. But there isn't that many red stuff to catch so it's the story that must do it.And the story is simple, a haunted house, a new caretaker, an new possession and an victim. Excellent performed by Lauren Ashley Carter who I have seen in a few horrors before. Is this a horror, well, it's not scary and it doesn't offer the creeps but it is still worth seeing. After watching another James Wan flick about ghosting and possessions I must say that this here attracted me more then the over-hyped Conjuring 2. Of course youth will not see this at any change and if they do they I guess would be more scared then the usual teenage horror.The horror lays in the fact that a body has to disappear so a hammer and saw is used and that is the most gruesome part especially the tooth part.Worth picking up if you are into horror just for that particular scene, and clocking in at 77 makes it easy to watchGore 1/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 1/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

Shot in black n white, arranged in non-chronological order, and evidently influenced by Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy (especially Repulsion), there is no denying that Darling is a stylishly directed feature but in its overambitious attempt to homage the notable horror classic, it ends up becoming an overbearing & convoluted mess.Set in New York, the story of Darling follows an unnamed young woman who agrees to house sit at a large mansion that appears to have a notorious past. With nothing to do & unable to kill time, she begins to lose her grasp on reality as the extended exposure to the isolation that abounds the empty mansion triggers her descent into madness.Written & directed by Mickey Keating, Darling is his tribute to the atmospheric chillers of the 1960s but the film lacks an identity of its own. Throughout its 78 minutes runtime, it applies tricks such as sporadically cutting to maniacal frames, screeching noises for its score & mindless meandering but all its intricacy lies only on the surface, for it is hollow from the inside.The monochrome filters, confined setting & clever use of camera do manage to bring an unsettling element into the picture but the narrative is simply out of focus and fails to capitalise on that. The only one who is actually able to redeem something out of this whole clutter is Lauren Ashley Carter who tries her best to make her character work and chips in with a violent performance.On an overall scale, Darling finds its filmmaker succeeding at replicating the look of Repulsion but he is unable to add the same level of thematic depth which turned that psychological horror into a genre classic. Deficient in numerous storytelling aspects & pretending to be something it isn't, this artistic endeavour bounces all over the place yet in the end, finds itself not far from where it started. Skip it.