Out of Darkness

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.

They all followed Adem to this new promised land, and it hasn’t worked out. They’re starving.

And then, on their way to a mountain, which they equate with safety, they start being picked off at night by something that seems to mean them harm.

They have mastered fire, but their fear of the dark is primal, and, given the context, entirely appropriate. They cannot see what is attacking them, and their fear makes them do stupid things as if they were teenagers in an 80s slasher flick.

It’s not lost on me that two of our characters are called Adem and Ave, which is not a million miles or 45,000 years away from Adam and Eve. But thankfully, for me, at least, Adem won’t be around long enough to keep terrorising his own people.

This seems to be a time of tribal life where whoever is the most aggressive gets to lead, and the perks involve impregnating every female, and eating before everyone else. When they refer to Beyah as the stray, it implies she was forcibly kidnapped from another tribe, but at least they have a shared tongue in common. Adem makes it clear that this is an era, like in a contemporary American Southern state, where she does not have bodily autonomy, and no agency.

Fuck you, Adem, think the (decent members of the) audience and Beyah: We hope something comes along and rips your fucking head off.

Adem and Geirr often have conflict as to what they should do next, and Adem tends to win the arguments by pushing people over or threatening them with his spear. He clearly has anger management issues, and needs to work on his leadership style.

At first the flick plays out like a competent version of the “Palaeolithic group of people brave the unknown and get killed” type of story, which is not that common a genre piece, to be honest. Even though I am in no way implying there was any bandwagon jumped on, or idea ripped off, it’s not a tremendously different flick from what they did with Prey a couple of years ago, which pitted an alien Predator against a tribe of First Nations people, which was great.

That was very different thematically from what’s going on here. I am not going to spoil the revelation as to what was actually going on, and what danger they were actually facing, but what it does is take a film that’s squarely in the horror / action genre, and gives it an ending which is neither horrific nor triumphant. It results in an ending which is deeply sad, even as we are somewhat glad that enough people have survived in order to realise the magnitude of their terrible mistake.

There is so much we, as a species were getting wrong 43,000 years ago, and so much we’re still getting wrong today.

Out of darkness comes light, the light of knowledge, the diminishment of ignorance, the hope of better days, but there is so much bone-crunching murder that happens on the long path towards it.

The performances are fine, the use of the awkward made-up Basque dialect works well to at least make us think that this is a strange time and place, and not just a colourful pantomime of people in surprisingly well sewn outfits made out of animal skins. This doesn’t have the embarrassment potential of earlier types of ‘early humans’ movies like, I dunno, Clan of the Cave Bear, or One Million BC, but then it doesn’t have Raquel Welch in a fur bikini either, which is probably to the film’s benefit.

Beyah, who goes through so much, is clearly the stand out character, and I think my favourite moment with her involves an incredulous Geirr mumbling to her that he can’t understand why she’s gone through all of this and yet isn’t scared.

She looks at him clearly and says that she is scared, it’s just that she really wants to live as well.

The mood they create and maintain, with the low light cinematography, and the dark ambient soundtrack / score goes a long way towards establishing and sustaining a fairly fearful and horrific atmosphere. Anything set in the forests make it seem like such places are not for humans, early or otherwise. And there’s a stand out scene involving horrible happenings at night, with the accompaniment of the green lights of the aurora borealis beaming down upon all, beaming down upon people terrified of their own shadows, who don’t even have any words, made up or not, for what they’re seeing.

What they’re experiencing isn’t awe, that’s for sure.

I thought Out of Darkness was a pretty strong flick, probably made with a tenth of the budget of the earlier mentioned Prey, but they did very well to complete this flick during a difficult time.

8 times I’m also glad there was no Planet of the Apes type bullshit revealing that what we thought was the past was really the future out of 10

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“In three days, all of this land will be ours” – ok coloniser - Out of Darkness