By: Christina DelPrete
#horror – #horrormovies – #horrorreviews – #BetweenTheDarkness –
Director: Andres Rovira
Writer: Andres Rovira
Starring: Lew Temple, Danielle Harris, Nicole Moorea Sherman
Sprout Grady is a 13 year old girl who is convinced that there is a monster lurking in the nearby woods. She goes on a mission with her younger brother to destroy this being but instead she uncovers many secrets that change the outlook on everything she thought she once knew.
Upon watching the trailer for Between The Darkness, I thought it looked pretty interesting and like something that would be able to hold my attention all the way through. Boy was I disappointed. The movie in itself was lacking a good story line and seemed to just jump from scene to scene without making much sense. This made it very difficult to watch. In the sense of it being labeled as a horror, that seems like a far stretch for this particular movie. I would describe it more as a psychological thriller.
The movie takes place a year after Sprout’s sister has passed away. She is left with her younger brother, Percy, and her father, Roy. Roy has raised his children to pick out a Greek god to worship and embody in hopes of living in a positive world. He and his children live in a sanctuary that his father has built to keep them away from the real world. The movie is slow to progress as it drowns in the day to day life that this family lives and the rituals they partake in. Sprout has night terrors/lucid dreams of these monsters that are trying to attack her and her family. She tries to talk to her father about them however he dismisses everything and sends her off to meditate and think about the goddess that he is trying to get her to embody. Later on you find that that he struggles with his own faith and the beliefs that he is forcing upon his children. The movie only started to gain my attention towards the end where Sprout’s world is flipped upside down as she uncovers secrets about her father and the terrible sins he has committed.
Between The Darkness has a couple of bigger names in the cast such as Lew Temple and Danielle Harris. The acting throughout the movie wasn’t the best but also wasn’t the worst. Lew Temple did a convincing job of playing the role of a family man turned failed cult leader. Danielle’s role was very minor however so there wasn’t much development with her. Nicole Sherman and Tate Birchmore are lesser known and I was not familiar with them however both of them seemed to do pretty well with the roles they were portraying.
There was not much that I enjoyed about the movie. One thing I was keen on was the depiction of the monster that Sprout kept seeing. The monster wasn’t shown in great detail other than being decrepit, tall, lanky and with a beak; I think that ties in with comments that the father makes about his deceased wife and daughter. When Sprout talks about this “gorgon”, she mentions how it looks like Medusa. The other thing I enjoyed most was a line toward the end of the movie when a minor character says, “Good riddance, daddy.” That line ties into the dark theme of the father and his crazy antics.
All in all, I would not re-watch this movie. There is too much that is left to be desired with a plot that seems to have many gaps in it and characters that desperately needed more development. It needed something more to up the creep factor to be able to label it a “horror” movie, which could have created a darker undertone to play into the thriller aspect.
Rating: 4/10