From Black

In 2016, Liam Gavin’s heartbreaking and keenly intelligent A Dark Song set the bar for films about grieving mothers of stolen sons turning to the occult in search of a solution, and set it high. Nevertheless, hopes were high for From Black, whose take on the difficult business of what happens in the aftermath of loss was said to be informed by director Thomas Marchese’s experiences in his former career as a police officer. Marchese previously made the documentary Fallen, which attempted to dive into the psychology of officers who have lost colleagues in the line of duty yet continue to serve. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have made much effort to look beneath the surface when it comes to the people whom officers often find themselves working with.

This film begins and ends with police sergeant Bray (Jennifer Lafleur) exploring the scene of a crime. Nobody knows precisely what crime, but they do know that a woman with a string of offences to her name has been found there is a state of panic, covered in blood which is not her own. This woman is Cora (Anna Camp), who is known to Bray because she used to be a junkie and because she was the mother of a young boy, Noah (Eduardo Campirano) who disappeared some years ago. In flashbacks, we see Bray’s most recent interrogation of Cora – towards whom she feels a degree of protectiveness – along with recent events as Cora describes them.

This second – and central – narrative takes us to the peer support group through which the now sober Cora has been seeking help to cope with her bereavement. It doesn’t seem to be doing her much good – she’s at a stage where confronting and processing even a small part of her pain feels so overwhelming as to be impossible. Through the group, however, she meets Abel (John Ales), father to a murdered daughter, who makes an interesting proposition. He claims to have discovered a way in which she can bring back her child, if she is prepared to dabble in dark things. After a lengthy preparatory process which seems to be going nowhere, unexpected events give her reason to start taking him seriously.

There’s a twist coming, and, alas, viewers won’t have much difficulty figuring it out too soon, turning over the few available narrative possibilities in their heads over and over again simply because Marchese offers no interesting distractions. Camp tries to inject some life into Cora but the character is painfully underwritten, all confusion and tragedy, permitted no depth beyond the bare minimum required for the story, her bereavement and history of addiction comprising her whole personality. Abel is singularly unconvincing, mansplaining his way through subjects of which he is evidently ignorant, giving the impression that his supposed occult wisdom is purely plagiarised – and perhaps it is. Needless to say, there is a malign presence at work here, but it doesn’t embody quite as much horror as it should. This isn’t just because we’ve seen monsters which look just like it countless times before. It’s down to something more fundamental: nothing can really compete with the horror of losing a child.

Luigi Janssen’s score, all nervous, staggered strings, does a lot of heavy lifting, and there’s something to be said for the simplicity of the set design, chalk lines on pale ash floorboards, grotesque sounds emerging from behind magnolia-painted doors. The main performers are not bad, but overall this feels like a missed opportunity. It has certainly misunderstood the word ‘occult’, because rarely is a plot this transparent, and it isn’t terribly strong on the horror either, aside from a generalised sort of creepiness which is enjoying something of a renaissance this year but is delivered better elsewhere. It’s not actively awful and subgenre completists may still enjoy it, but it just doesn’t seem to have much raison d’être.