FILM REVIEW: DARKNESS IN TENEMENT 45

Ultimately, Darkness is Tenement 45 is a let-down. What should be a taut psychological horror about a group of people from diverse backgrounds forced to shelter in place together is instead a dull plodding chore with nothing to say beyond ‘adults don’t listen to kids and mental illness is dangerous’.

As I write this, England is entering its second national lockdown. While it’s not quite a shelter-in-place order, it is round two of claustrophobia and isolation for many of us, and with the nights drawing in as Winter stalks towards us, what better time to watch Darkness in Tenement 45, a horror film about being trapped in your home for fear of a deadly microscopic threat outside?


The year is 1953. Stalin has hold of a biological weapon, and Eisenhower gives the order for New York City to be evacuated. Despite this, hundreds of people refuse to evacuate and barricade themselves in their buildings to wait out the threat. We follow the trials of the inhabitants of one such building – Tenement 45.


It’s been one month. Supplies are dwindling and morale is low. Level-headed leader Felix (David Labiosa) is just barely able to keep things from falling apart, while overbearing matronly type Martha (Casey Kramer) keeps a close watchful eye on her teenage niece Joanna (Nicole Tompkins) who suffers from a mysterious condition referred to as “the darkness”.


When Felix sets out into the possibly-biochemically-hazardous city to forage for supplies, the cracks in the small community of families begin to widen and tempers run high. With Martha’s power growing and waifish Joanna struggling to contain her symptoms, is the danger indoors greater than the danger outside?


Darkness in Tenement 45 is writer/director Nicole Groton’s first foray into horror – and sadly it shows. Neither she nor cinematographer Carissa Dorson have a background in horror film, and there’s little evidence of a love for the genre in the film itself. While everyone starts somewhere, it’s odd to see a horror film made by a crew who mostly don’t seem to have even dabbled in horror shorts before embarking on an ambitious feature. The same can be said of the cast, with the notable exception of Nicole Tompkins who knows a thing or two about bioweapons, having been both the voice and the mo-cap actor for this year’s Resident Evil 3 video game remake.


The proof is in the pudding, and this pudding is sadly a bit bland and tasteless. Everything feels flat, from the performances to most of the shots and the pacing. On a positive note, the score by Logan Rees starts out well, dark and moody, especially when played over the stylish opening credits. It starts to go off the rails later when it’s not used appropriately to fit the tone of the scene. Case in point – one of the building’s inhabitants is Felix’s son Tomas (Nicolas Aleksandr Bolton) who lives with his older sisters. He pervs on them, is obsessed with their busts and hides himself away in the closet to masturbate while they’re in the room. This is horrifying stuff, but the music chosen to accompany all this is an old song played on a record, the type you’d see a couple slow-dancing to in most films set in this period. It makes an already uncomfortable scene more uncomfortable to watch, but not in a satisfying knot-in-your-stomach type way.


That’s the biggest problem with the film, I think. Lack of tension. The film should feel tight and claustrophobic, to sell the sense of a group forced to huddle together and falling apart as egos clash. Or the cast should be smaller, dwarfed by the space in the building’s rooms, to mirror the isolation you’d feel if you weren’t sure if you were the last people in your city. Instead, everything feels like business as usual, just in dingy run-down rooms. It doesn’t help that they open the front door so many times that it really doesn’t feel like there’s the slightest danger of an airborne toxin being around because if there were then they’d all be dead already.


The cast try their best to make us feel like they’re in dire straits, but they’re just not selling it, and the adults vs. kids climax is unintentionally hilarious with an ending that can be seen coming a mile away. The weakest link in the cast is Kramer as Aunt Martha, whose attempts to be authoritarian are strained and forced. Tompkins is game, giving Joanna a kind of wide-eyed concern at everything around her and doing her best to make Joanna’s ambiguous condition interesting. At first I thought The Darkness might bring a supernatural twist, and wondered if there was some sort of demonic presence involved. Sadly no, it’s yet another Mystery Hollywood Mental Condition that manifests itself in weird dreams (shot in that ugly blue/red light I hate) and bursts of violence against others for no real reason.
  
It’s interesting that despite the presence of two African-American foster kids and the Hispanic family in the building, there’s not a single sign of any racial prejudice going on. In this film that’s set in America in the 50s. Perhaps this was a conscious decision, as this is ground that’s well-trodden in things like Lovecraft Country, but it’s very conspicuous by its absence. I’m not at all saying that if you make a film set in the 50s it should be wall-to-wall racial slurs; it just breaks the suspension of disbelief when the main conflict is between the adults and the kids as a monolith, without any sense or even mention of the injustice and inequality that would likely have been in play. Characters use the word ‘orphan’ to refer to the foster kids with almost as much malice as they’d use a slur, so maybe this was an intentional substitute. It just feels like the filmmakers didn’t trust themselves enough to handle it maturely so they just ignored it. If only they’d done the same with the mental health issue.


Ultimately, Darkness is Tenement 45 is a let-down. What should be a taut psychological horror about a group of people from diverse backgrounds forced to shelter in place together is instead a dull plodding chore with nothing to say beyond ‘adults don’t listen to kids and mental illness is dangerous’.


Avoid.

Review by Sam Kurd