Mickey Keating’s ‘Darling’ is a waltz with insanity, as an ode to another era becomes a fascinating look at a shattered mind

“Ma’am, I think I’m going to go become one of your ghost stories now…”

Don’t you just love when a horror film simply sinks its teeth into you from frame one?

When as soon as the opening score starts rolling, you can feel the film’s fingers wrap around your throat and begin to tighten.

Images begin to flicker on the screen and subconsciously you can hear the locks click shut behind you. You’re trapped and at the complete mercy of what you’re about to watch.

Horror isn’t always about being trapped, but Darling is a film that makes a four-course meal out of the concept, making sure that you are just as uncomfortable and off put as its protagonist, Darling (Lauren Ashley Carter in a career-making performance), is. If you’re even remotely interested in this film, you’ve likely heard the echo chamber of comments about how it’s a psychological masterpiece, but director Mickey Keating (Pod, the upcoming Carnage Park, and a name that you’re going to be very familiar with soon enough) works incredibly hard to make this as much of a visceral experience as it is a film. Even amidst the production companies in the opening credits, there’s a disclaimer that the film contains “flashing lights and hallucinatory images.” While the note is likely there as a warning, it’s equally effective at setting the mood and already getting you to raise your guard before anything has even happened.

Another beautiful thing here is that Darling does not heap a ton of story onto itself. All you need to know is that Darling is the caretaker of an allegedly haunted apartment, with her progressively losing it through the experience. It fully works in Darling’s favor that it’s such a hardboiled, concise piece of filmmaking. The whole thing doesn’t even run 80 minutes with it just breezing by and leaving you wanting more rather than overstaying its welcome and dulling its edge over time. Horror has a real tendency lately to get lost in the details, with this being so minimalistic and never attempting to over explain things. Keating’s film tells you just enough about Darling. It whets your appetite while still shading in details about her past. There’s a lot up for interpretation, intentionally trying to provoke discussion, which is what all great horror should do.

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Due to the film’s simplicity, a lot of it hinges on the performance of Lauren Ashley Carter, who absolutely rises to the occasion. She floats through this film with an otherworldly quality, her delivery at times reaching a truly haunting cadence and emotion behind her lines. There’s a conversation that she has on the phone towards the end of the film that gives me chills just thinking about. A lot of people have spoken about Darling slowly cracking through the picture—the film’s logline even describes the film as Darling losing her mind through the whole ordeal. I think it’s pretty safe to argue though that Darling is irrevocably broken before the film even begins. This isn’t some Satanic situation that transforms her, it simply focuses who she already is.

I think the most impressive thing about Darling is its ability to trap you in Darling’s state of mind with her. The film is constantly assaulting you with its editing and sound design, giving you no safety or reprieve, just like what Darling is going through. You begin to become consistently tense and unnerved because at any moment a jump cut might surprise you. When Darling meets Henry Sullivan, she freaks out because of her baggage, and we freak out because of how the film is being assembled. The film is full of moments like this and it works so well.

While not strictly a horror film, David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE contains a scene in it that I used to think was maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s a haunting moment where Laura Dern’s character runs at the screen, and it just slices through your entire being. Somehow Darling manages to be that moment for essentially its entire runtime. It’s astounding.

Right from the start you can also see that Darling is a film that is heavy with influences. There’s such a ‘60s sensibility to its monochromatic look, pacing, and even its use of chapters throughout the picture. Keating’s previous film, Pod, is another claustrophobic hallucination of a film with a minimalist cast and setup, and if that’s Keating’s niche then I’m more than fine with that. Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy” are also deeply responsible here—especially Repulsion, one of my all-time favorites—in terms of exploring paranoia, self-created claustrophobia, and a slowly crumbling mind. You can see shades of Barton Fink in here too, in respect to the wildly untrustworthy narrator that’s steering the ship. There are even touches of Eraserhead, Diabolique, and Tetsuo, The Iron Man as well, in regards to the cinematography of these black-and-white fever dreams. Altman’s Images feels represented in the film’s surreal score, and the underseen 1968, Surface Tension, is surely responsible for the epileptic aesthetic that the film carries, as well as using dissonance to form a pattern and rhythm. There’s a lot being referenced and pulled together here and it’s why Darling feels like such a full experience.

It’s hard to not give Darling a chance, with its short runtime and relatively simple story at its core. It’s certainly not the film for everyone, and in fact might even be too much for certain people due to its intensity. There’s little risk for the reward here, and you’ll get to watch two rising stars of their trade, Lauren Ashley Carter and Mickey Keating, take you on a ride.