Big
old houses. On the one hand, great – impress your mates with all that space to
spread themselves about, have fantastic parties, loads of room for guests at
Christmas and whole rooms to dedicate to various aspects of your science fiction
and fantasy collection, including luxurious wooden shelf-space to house all of your
copies of STARBURST magazine dating back to 1977. So yes, very cool indeed. But
then there’s those nights when you’re all on your lonesome with the whole
darned place to yourself and there’s a howling wind outside and strange
creaking noises echoing down the stairs…

An unnamed young woman, nervous as a dormouse,
arrives at a giant New York mansion said to be the oldest in the city.  She is applying for a job as a Caretaker to
the property while the ‘Madame’ of the house is away. All seems well for the
appointment, pending references of course, but there’s just that one pesky
thing to be imparted; the previous Caretaker committed suicide by hurling
herself off the balcony. So not a major issue then.

This is a film student’s
nirvana; director Mickey Keating (Carnage
Park) clearly loves his Polanski but there are also pungent aromas of De
Palma and Kubrick wafting around the piece.  The keyword here is madness; it infests every
frame and totally dictates the movie’s style; one only has to see ‘Darling’s googly-eyed
interview with the lady of the house (a nice cameo from Sean Young) to clock
just how well leading lady Lauren Ashley Carter has nailed the nutter gene.  As well as the obvious parallels with
Catherine Deneuve’s peerless turn in Repulsion,
there’s a giant kiss to Kubrick’s controversial
twist on The Shining; the Overlook is
supposed to turn Jack Torrance mad but as soon as we see Jack Nicholson driving
up to the hotel we know he’s crazed already.

Keating hit gold when he found
the old mansion location for this movie. Originally intended for a more modern
setting, plans apparently changed when Lauren Ashley Carter (did we say how good
she is in this?) told him about the giant gaff owned by a family for whom she
walked dogs. Bingo!  Just as the famous
old Bradbury Building transformed the atmosphere of the classic Outer Limits
segment Demon With A Glass Hand and
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, so this
piece of NYC real estate proves a formidable character in its own right; the
stuff of nightmares in fact.

Darling is a fun ride if you like your psycho-thrillers spiced with classic
influences but could have taken a further tip from Polanski and eased back a
notch (or three) on the showmanship. Yes, we dig all the references and the
black and white photography is starkly beautiful, but the over-use of jarring
synaptic flash-shots  and  garish colour title cards before each portentously-named
‘chapter’ smack of too much time spent tinkering around in post-production. Similarly
overcooked is the scenario; with the main character clearly out of her gourd
from the off, the bleakly imposing old house is more than enough to trigger the
events that follow; the Amityville-style supernatural layer that’s added on
feels redundant.

So yes, a more stripped-back, less self-consciously
referential film exists under all of the pyrotechnic ‘technique’ on show but
this is still an accomplished work anchored by a mesmeric leading performance.

DARLING /  CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: MICKEY KEATING / STARRING: LAUREN ASHLEY CARTER, SEAN YOUNG, BRIAN MORVANT, LARRY FESSENDEN, JOHN SPEREDAKOS / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 24TH