Super Dark Times (2017)
Directed by Kevin Phillips
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.
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6 films that influenced Super Dark Times
What critics say influenced Super Dark Times
It’s also—as many critics have already pointed out —a spiritual descendant of Tim Hunter’s terrific 1986 drama River’s Edge, about a group of teenagers scarily unfazed—and even excited—by a murder committed by one of their classmates.
Here they reunite with cinematographer Eli Born and editor Ed Yonaitis for a story which consciously echoes the likes of River's Edge and Stand by Me in terms of plot, while also displaying thematic and stylistic debts to Donnie Darko and the small-town pictures of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
Super Dark Times is a coming of age picture that harkens back to the glory days of R-rated '80s teen movies like River’s Edge , slices of moody truth that contain a significant amount of darkness at their core.
Thirteen years before the Columbine High School massacre, Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge painted a chilling portrait of numb teenage ennui and the banality of baby-faced evil.
It’s a ’90s teen thriller that has hints of “Stand By Me” and “River’s Edge” about it.
Comparisons to Stand By Me and Donnie Darko have already been made, but the film in which Super Dark Times footsteps seems to be following is It Follows.
But these references are texture rather than the point of the exercise (although a bit where two of the characters argue over who would win a fight between Silver Surfer and Punisher calls back to Stand by Me pretty loudly).
Here they reunite with cinematographer Eli Born and editor Ed Yonaitis for a story which consciously echoes the likes of River's Edge and Stand by Me in terms of plot, while also displaying thematic and stylistic debts to Donnie Darko and the small-town pictures of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
A slow-burn high school thriller that’s like a tortured cross between “Stand By Me” and “Donnie Darko” (with a bit of Dostoyevskian madness thrown in there for good measure, Phillips’ feature-length debut begins by welcoming us to a grey Hudson Valley town that’s lost in the barren phantom zone between fall and winter.
While the period setting dispenses with plot complications such as mobile phones, it does lead Super Dark Times into Stand By Me territory - and it’s to Phillips’ credit that his rich character study mostly stands up to that scrutiny.
The long shadow of “Stand by Me” will always haunt films about the confluence of childhood and death, though “Super Dark Times” largely ditches nostalgia for a decidedly darker turn, and not just because the 1990s suburban community where it takes place is awash in wood paneling and brown furniture.
It’s the mid-’90s, so they have to use the yearbook to find pictures of the girls they lust after, or a furtively watched VHS copy of True Lies.
The lo-fi tech (cassettes, a Discman, cable descramblers), and kids jacking off to Jamie Lee Curtis’ True Lies striptease allow you to slide right into this epoch, (un)comfortably riding your own Schwinn down these manicured streets, sneaking cigarettes in the park and shouting “penis!” like a brat in front of your crush’s house.
They’re an immature foursome blabbing about comic book superheroes, cursing up a storm while discussing the grossness of dried squid (which they all try), bragging about how they’re immortal (“like Highlander”) and, in Daryl’s case, announcing that he jerked off “two-and-a-half times” to True Lies ’ striptease scene.
The morbid humor, boorish banter, trolling the school yearbook telling dirty lies or dirtier truths about the girls whose pictures they see therein, the warped values, creepy lack of a sense of proportion, the insane, inane admissions about why they watch their parents’ copy of “True Lies” late at night (Jamie Lee Curtis striptease), the ’90s fashion sense, impotent rage at bullies, not knowing what to do with your older brother’s pot stash now that he’s in the military, the tentative blunders in approaching that first real crush — it’s excruciating — to an ex-“Boy” any way.
Comparisons to Stand By Me and Donnie Darko have already been made, but the film in which Super Dark Times footsteps seems to be following is It Follows.
The events of the film take place amid creepy watercolor backdrops reminiscent of that other perfect suburban mood piece , Donnie Darko, as well as in homes with old, tacky furniture and around space heaters in ugly garages.
Here they reunite with cinematographer Eli Born and editor Ed Yonaitis for a story which consciously echoes the likes of River's Edge and Stand by Me in terms of plot, while also displaying thematic and stylistic debts to Donnie Darko and the small-town pictures of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.
A slow-burn high school thriller that’s like a tortured cross between “Stand By Me” and “Donnie Darko” (with a bit of Dostoyevskian madness thrown in there for good measure, Phillips’ feature-length debut begins by welcoming us to a grey Hudson Valley town that’s lost in the barren phantom zone between fall and winter.
It’s an authentic, honest and emotional experience that could be this generation’s Mean Creek or Donnie Darko .
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That movie essentially amounted to a half-baked tribute to 2007’s Zodiac, and a single bargain-bin DVD copy of it was passed around basements in my hometown for several years as a joke.
Zach is similarly reticent with Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino), his longtime crush, whose sudden advances only serve to exacerbate his paranoia (and plunge him into dreams with a morbid eroticism partially cribbed from Lars von Trier’s Antichrist).
Even as the story’s dramatic tension disappears amidst an an overload of sinister dream sequences, and the confused pathos that Phillips wrenches out of his characters begins to feel like a hollow excuse to play with brooding imagery and reframe an iconic shot from Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” the movie still keeps you in its sway.