2013 Directed by Warwick Thornton
Writer and Director Warwick Thornton has assembled a collection of the most poignant, sad, funny and absurd ghost stories from around Australia. He will bring them to life with the help of some of Australia's most iconic actors as the storytellers.
While the concept and production of this anthology horror fake documentary is interesting, the actual execution of it was rather dry, with only a few speakers being engrossing due to the their presence and ability to suck you in. My favourite sequence was the one about the woman working in the Sound and Video Archive for Australia. The Darkside is probably better suited to be analysed for high school or university essays rather than for entertainment purposes, which, funnily enough, is exactly the reason I watched this because it is one of the films in one of my uni courses. If you are not doing my specific unit though, no need to watch this.
Warwick Thornton's left of centre follow up to the stunning Samson & Delilah is series of recountings of Aboriginal ghost stories. A call was put out and over a hundred encounters by Aboriginals or with Aboriginal ghosts (by white people) were recorded, the tellers interviewed on screen. Those interviews were then narrowed down and collated and rerecorded, mostly with professional (and well known) actors.
The film is a strange series of verbatim theatre plays, the texts lifted directly it seems and recreated by the actors. It seems to work best when the actors are minimising their performances (Bryan Brown) or when they are unrecognisable. Claudia Karvan's segment is much too "reenacted". Couple with the separate segments is disparate visual styles across…
Insufficent as ghost stories and the static staging only adds so much interest individually, but weaved together they form an unspoken context of a people haunted not by horrors, but history (though those two may be the same thing). We settlers, or so we call ourselves, brought the Ouija board with us, we brought the pop songs that recur, devilish detritus of Western civilisation that has managed to work its way into the dreamtime nightmares of the land's original owners. We store movies in their morgues.
(Full disclosure, it took me too long to realise the conceit here, that actors were retelling submitted stories, and so I briefly lost all respect for Claudia Karvan, though that chapter remains hilarious nonetheless.)
Stumbled across this by accident. The re-enactments were too deliberate and the acting simply wasn’t good enough. The few stories that worked really worked - the one with Ben Quilty’s painting and the Screen Archives were about as good as films can get. I understand the decision to get professional actors in, but I think it would’ve worked far better if they’d kept all the original audio recordings and shaped tone poems around them.
