Out of Darkness
From darkness we came; to the lovely darkness we will return
dir: Andrew Cumming
2022
This Stone Age-set horror flick was made during the dreaded covid era, but was only released this year in cinemas, I think. It’s a perfect covid era flick: it’s all filmed outdoors, some people are wearing masks, no toilet paper anywhere, fear drives people to do terrible things to each other…
Forty three thousand years ago is long enough ago that you can make up whatever shit you want as to how ‘early’ humans might have acted, thought or behaved. If you believe archaeologists and palaeontologists (and what would they know, being people who’ve devoted their lives to academic study and figuring out what went on literal ages ago), this was before agriculture, before alphabets and before social media. How did they know who to cancel, then?
This flick takes a curious yet welcome approach to how these early humans communicate. I am not going to pretend that I know or knew what “Tola” was prior to this experience, but I can say now that most of our protagonists here speak a made up Basque/Arabic dialect. I don’t know how much to read into that, but for the purposes of our story, I think it runs something like this: A group of ‘early’ homo sapiens travel from possibly the coast of what we call Spain today to the eastern shores of what we call Scotland these days.
How do I know any of that? I don’t. I know it was filmed in Scotland, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in Scotland, since 43,000 years ago, it wasn’t called Scotland, it was probably called something like *click* *pop* *snik* “cold death land” or something like it by these people. They’ve left an inhospitable place and come to an even more inhospitable place. Nothing grows on the blasted heath that they can eat, they’re terrified of forests, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything around.
In other words it’s only slightly less hospitable than it is today.
The leader is called Adem (Chuku Modu), and he’s a violent bully and a piece of shit, but in this day and age, that makes you a natural leader. He has a pregnant partner, Ave (Iola Evans) and a teenage son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), and a fearful brother, Geirr (Kit Young). There’s also an old ‘wise’ man, Odal (Arno Luening), and a young woman they refer to as a stray, Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green).
Adem thinks he is the main character and skips reading the assignment. He is incorrect. Beyah is the main character, and she has very much read the assignment.
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