I’ve just seen the first really good scary movie of 2024. It’s called Out of Darkness and it’s set 45,000 years ago, in a prehistoric age when the land was “old and dark,” as one of the characters intones over a fire.
Let me just say that I love when this happens, when a cut-above genre movie emerges out of the dreck-y flotsam of the January/February movie season and sets the bar for the rest of the year. Last year it was M3GAN. In 2022 it was X (though we had to wait till March). In 2021, Saint Maud. The all-time example is Get Out in 2017—a still unmatched early-year surprise (that should have won best picture, dammit).
Out of Darkness, which is showing in limited theaters, is a survival tale: Six Paleolithic characters against a dark force hunting them when the sun goes down. And like any good late-night film, it takes no time to get moving, though let me first set a few things straight. This debut feature from the Scottish director Andrew Cumming is indeed set during the Stone Age, and so the characters speak an (invented) language, one devised with the help of an academic advisor and translated via subtitles. Are you down for 90 minutes of gibberish…or “Tola” (as it’s identified in the press notes, a mix of Arabic and Basque and Sanskrit)? I was first amused, and then quickly impressed with the actors’ fluency and commitment. Another thing: the cast—a highly athletic crew of mostly UK newcomers—do wear furs and tote spears, but it took me a moment to buy they were Paleolithic given how relatively kempt and attractive they all are.
No matter; this movie is a stylish, breathless wonder, shot in the stunning Scottish Highlands in spectral natural light and set to a percussive, thumping score. It’s more thriller than horror film, though there are bouts of visceral violence and when the group plunges into a old-growth forest, the Blair Witch vibes fully descend. The setup is efficiently explained: This small group—two brothers, one with his pregnant partner and his son, plus a teenage hanger-on and a shifty forager—have crossed a sea in search of fertile land, only to find an inhospitable landscape of cold winds and barren earth (Scotland, presumably, but not named). They are starving and desperate to find shelter in distant mountain caves, but something is out there, menacing their route.
I loved how Cumming marries art-house sophistication with crowd-pleasing horror movie tropes—like the way the group is picked off one by one, and the order is in constant doubt. I also loved the way glimpses of the adversary—supernatural, bestial, or something else entirely—are doled out through mist, gloom, and shadow.
The movie looks amazing from the opening scene, but when the group braves the forest to save one of their own, the atmospherics are unparalleled: fugitive light, arboreal murk, and sounds that make you sit up. My only complaint with this beautifully engineered film is that a bit of didacticism creeps into the denouement. I wasn’t sure I needed Out of Darkness to teach me how a civilization is built (in Tola!), but forgive and forget: A movie this joltingly good deserves nothing but credit.
