One of my all time favorites.

Absolutely the worst movie.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Psychiatrist with a brain tumor spends a weekend with her husband and sister at their cabin. A knock on the door brings a young man who turns out to have a gun. Shortly thereafter, another man arrives, and he turns out to be a former patient of the doctor's, and he wants revenge. While he was in her care, he was given injections of an experimental drug that the doctor was trying on him as a guinea pig because they both have the same type of brain tumor. As the victims are held hostage, psychological games are played; I don't understand why except there has to be a reason to make this movie. Secrets are revealed, of course. I got confused at the end. I must have missed something because it didn't make any sense to me at all. But I give this film 5 stars for the good acting and the dialogue.

Like a brain surgeon's deftly wielded scalpel sinking into grey matter, skillful manipulation of cinematic elements merges with subtle transpositions in The Dark Hours. Along with clever segue-ways and strategically positioned ambiguity, The Dark Hours' filmmakers blur the line between objective and subjective reality in this fast-moving nail biter. It's engrossing, captivating, slickly edited and well-acted. Get ready for some disturbing twists and an unsettling climax.The Dark Hours keeps us guessing, dangling over the precipice between our home theater easy chairs, contemplating "what ifs," and fretting over what will happen next. And what happens next is just ... well just awful! For the characters in the story, that is.When institutional head-shrinker, Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) takes refuge from a personal crisis in her secluded snowbound cabin, she expects a quiet weekend with her aspiring novelist husband David (Gordon Currie) and sister Melody (Irius Graham). A worn expression about best-laid plans comes to mind, as one thing, something terrible, leads to another.Much of the action takes place after dark in Sam's remote abode, illuminated in a flickering amber candle and fireplace glow. There's a claustrophobic feeling inside the bungalow, which contrasts with the utter desolateness of the wide open, frozen tundra nightscape upon which it vulnerably sits. Hanging precariously by only a few threads, a wispy, gauze-like veneer of sanity separates the known from the uncertain. Only the cabin's frail wooden door insulates the occupants from infiltration by malevolent elements which might appear from anywhere out in the night. Indeed, such elements come knocking and once that creaky door is opened, sheer hell breaks loose.Instead of her hoped-for introspective interlude with David, from whom Samantha desperately requires emotional support, she instead discovers she's trapped in a love triangle between David and Melody. Just as Sam starts to unravel the details, the arrival of a duo of lunatics (literally) disrupts her family affair.The more the merrier, however, as the uninvited guests intend to help Sam acquire some truly objective perspective about her situation -and theirs. One of the interlopers is a patient, Harlan (Aidan Devine), with whom Samantha has a controversial history. He's escaped, and now with twitchy teenage protégé Adrian (Dov Tiefenbach) in tow, Harlan wants to impress upon Sam that he never much cared for her less-than-Hippocratic bedside manner.To boot, Harlan plans to help Sam sort out her domestic and professional issues, Jungian style. Or maybe just Nietzsche and Dr. Mengele style. Because while Harlan's diseased cerebrum is squirming like a toad, it turns out his is not the only one. Harlan detects that all present are in need of a little "psycho" therapy. Delightfully, he just happens to have a treatment regimen in mind for everyone -one which champions truth, illumination, and ... well this won't hurt a bit.OK, maybe just a LITTLE! Because it's going to start with some excruciatingly morbid games, games at gunpoint which involve a telephone, a diary and pair of cutting pliers.As the quintet prepare to venture on a schizophrenic journey of enlightenment, seamless perceptual juxtapositions provide an eerie insight to the escalating chain of developments, some of which are relayed via foreboding flashbacks and non-linear plot points. What ensues is pure bedlam when all involved spiral into a swirling maelstrom of horrid revelations and bloody confrontation.

My review is as in the subject above. By all means waste a tiny fraction of your life watching this, if... you absolutely must.If you must read more of my review, then here goes: it is a standard issue suspense movie, which takes everything from the genre and gives back pulp suspense for pulp brained viewers. Most people will probably quite enjoy this in the sense that most people think Richard Dawkins is a pompous arrogant man whose theory of evolution is at variance with the truth etc. (and not an extremely intelligent, most gifted scientist). Anyway, enough digression.The Dark Hours = A mundane exercise. As the cover blurb informs - it is indeed just another usual lonely cabin in the woods and vulnerable few staying there until the inevitable (yawn) probably starts zzz zzz zzz. I'll leave the events for your imagination, of course. Sorry, but I've given nothing particular away that you can't know already from simple reading about the movie and yet, it really does indeed do nothing more than what it says on the tin: Lazy, unoriginal film-making, neatly packaged into the average "suspense" genre.A movie rated 1/10 is so bad you can actually laugh at it. This movie, isn't bad enough to laugh at. It's just boring & unoriginal. So, it is indeed one of thousands upon thousands of instantly forgettable 2/10's

The thirty and something years old psychiatrist Dr. Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) has an incurable brain tumor that has just started to grow. Felling totally stressed, she decides to spend the weekend in her cottage with her husband, the writer David Goodman (Gordon Currie), and her sister Melody (Iris Graham). She unexpectedly arrives in the cabin and finds a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. Later, a young man, Adrian (Dov Tiefenbach), asks for help due to the cold weather and once in the house, he shows a gun and brings his partner, the violent sexual offender and Samantha's former patient Harlan Pyne (Aidan Devine). Along the night, Harlan forces the family to participate in twisted games, where truths are disclosed."The Dark Hours" is a tense and very well acted and directed thriller, having a surprising twist in the end. The process of madness of Dr. Samantha, using experimental drugs as her last chance to survive and having hallucinations, is impressive and very original. While watching the film, I was comparing the story with Michael Haneke's "Funny Game", but the plot point showing that jealous Samantha actually killed her husband and sister under the effect of the drug, and used her patient and his victim as a scapegoat to support the reality is refreshing. Unfortunately the Brazilian DVD is very poor, without any Extras or comments that might give further explanations of the screenplay. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Horas de Horror" ("Hours of Horror")