DarkGame

Why do people persist in thinking of the dark web as literally dark? Sure, there was a time when the whole internet was like that – when we communicated in text only and images were transmitted as hefty blocks of ones and zeroes, but time has marched on. At least, one would think that that successful dark web channels supposedly making lots of money from live torture porn would be able to afford a few lights and something to make their empty soundstages look distinctive. Still, this stripped-down look has sufficed for dozens of other films on the subject, so it may as well do for this one.

If you’re going to interest an audience in a story like this, you need to give them something shocking right at the start. This time we begin with a B-list presenter in a C-list velvet jacket and bird-like leather mask inviting viewers of his illicit channel – named Russian Roulette – to bid on how a losing ‘contestant’ should be killed. She is bound to a chair, whimpering and begging more like a newbie porn star than a credible human being, as if she wants to raise the ratings. A savvy viewer would assume it was staged but, we are assured, it is not. As soon as blood starts splattering, we cut away to the police, who are preparing to raid one of the channel’s suspected bases of operation. They don’t manage to catch it in action, but they do find a couple of survivors – children, which shows us, without the film directly taking on anything too controversial, that these are very bad bad guys indeed.

Thankfully, outside of the Russian Roulette scenes, the film has much more visual appeal, with noirish cinematography and a fluid style which recalls director Howard J Ford’s early work with his brother Jonathan. Ed Westwick and Lola Wayne work well enough as the lead detectives on the case, even if the former is lumbered with a cardboard cut-out of a character – pregnant wife, tragic backstory and all. The cutting between the investigation and other parts of the story is somewhat problematic, however, done in such a way that it often feels like an interruption rather than helping to build tension, and sometimes the different strands feel like different films jammed together, as if they had initially belonged to different scripts. Fragments of additional narrative – a prisoner brought in to assist, an intervention by the FBI – appear and disappear without really adding anything of value.

The other prominent strand of the film follows Katia (Natalya Tsvetkova), a Russian immigrant who has fled an abusive relationship and is trying to build a new life with her mother and son. We see the masked man watching her, along with other women, on an old fashioned evil genius bank of TV screens before she’s snatched from a lonely street, and subsequently we watch her struggle to survive, exchanging snippets of information with other prisoners who are controlled by guards with cattle prods. The economics of all this are a mystery – one can’t imagine that a channel like this would hold its audience for long, with little real showmanship and uninspired executions, yet there seems to be a vast operation behind it, with every operative unthinkingly loyal.

Relying on audience cynicism to sell this poorly substantiated premise, DarkGame puts the emphasis on what-if intimidation scenarios and general paranoia, implicitly suggesting that anyone not skilled in doling out violence is helpless around those who are. There’s a slight break in this when Katia figures out a way of passing on information to the outside world, but it’s too little too late to make things interesting. Ford runs through the routine mechanics of the story fairly well and shows that he can handle himself outside of an action context (there is a little of that here but not much), but overall one feels that, were it not for the chainsaws and the colour palette, this would be screening to bored homemakers on cable on a weekday afternoon.