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(Review) NEVER AFTER DARK: A Cozy Little Stay in Someone Else's Nightmare

By. Katelyn Nelson

 

Trauma is one of humanity’s most persistent ghosts. Since the beginning of time, we’ve been doing our best to deal with the lingering elements of our collective and individual past. Some choose to do this by way of exorcism, naming the thing and bringing it out in the open to be fully dissected and put to rest once and for all, and eventually looked back on as nothing more than a memory. Others choose to deal with it by simply not dealing with it at all, burying the memories beneath the creaking floorboards of their minds, learning nothing but how to repeat a cycle of damage for which they do not want to claim responsibility and will never fully know peace. This type would rather ignore the feeling at the back of their mind that comes out in the veil of their dreams and imagine a world instead where they have no culpability and everything is exactly as they imagine it should be—never mind that corner just at the edge of sight where a fire is burning.

Our constant struggle to effectively deal with our pasts is a matter of human nature that continuously, relentlessly haunts our present. It is for this reason I imagine ghost stories are so prescient all around the world. Every culture has at least one (and usually several) ghost stories to help them wrap their minds around some of life’s more otherwise incomprehensible horrors. Several of these entities across cultures are specifically created to embody and deal with traumas. Perhaps the most well-known culture in the horror sphere to consistently explore the concept of vengeful ghosts and their echoing effects on the living and the dead alike is that of Japan.

Some horrors don't need a supernatural explanation. Ken Russell's THE DEVILS finds plenty of monsters among the living, turning religious authority and collective hysteria into something far more frightening than demonic possession.

The early aughts boom of American remakes of some of Japan’s heavy hitters (like THE RING and THE GRUDGE franchises) proved both that we knew Japan was onto something and that we as a culture maybe tend to struggle with the idea of consuming media we have to access by way of subtitles (though for many, these remakes did serve to redirect fans back to the original source material, myself included). Fortunately, we have progressed to a place of acceptance of international horror on its own merits, allowing a platform for all manner of countries to rend and terrify us in ways we may not exactly be able to articulate.

Writer-director Dave Boyle’s latest, NEVER AFTER DARK, is the latest in a batch of Japanese ghost stories brought stateside, and what a privilege it is. The film follows Airi (Moeka Hoshi), a traveling medium who helps lost souls cross over as she gets a gig at a remote house that operates as a kind of bed and breakfast. The owner (Tae Kimura) claims her establishment is haunted, and requests Airi’s help to exorcise it of the spirits tormenting the space. Airi agrees and soon takes up residence, though she warns the owners away from being present while she works. We follow her process as she digs deeper into the house’s mystery, and it’s not long before the horrors start to mount. What began as a routine job soon becomes life threatening, and the secrets she uncovers reveal some of humanity’s darkest capabilities.

To describe something like NEVER AFTER DARK as “cozy” may seem like a misnomer, but in truth that is part of its power. Its minimal cast and location firmly plants viewers in a single space, lulling you into a sense of familiarity and a kind of comfort even as it begins to tighten its grip. Patrick Ouziel’s cinematography is the kind of claustrophobic that feels expansive, a character of its own in making this slow burn ignite at just the right moments and never letting viewers forget the stakes.

Slow burns don’t work for everyone, but if you give yourself over to this one and let its atmosphere envelope you, NEVER AFTER DARK may well prove to be one of your new favorite nightmares.

NEVER AFTER DARK is now playing in theaters from Magnolia Pictures

There's something especially unnerving about a horror film that lets its setting do much of the frightening. Radek Velicka found that same atmospheric power in NIGHTBORN, where Hanna Bergholm transforms the Finnish wilderness into a place where the familiar becomes deeply unsettling.