Great Film overall

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

the problem for me with this movie was the texture. I thought, "oh OK Foucault, the panopticon" because of the way the first big section was all about spying on the part of this boy who seemed destined to see everything no matter where he looked, but then of course that's his imaginary narrative, and so it makes sense that the blind people don't act like real blind people, that the world seems completely fake, and yet. . . in order for all this to play, the blindness shouldn't be so formalized - the constant pulling apart and putting back together of the damn white canes, everyone staring ahead without sunglasses, looking for all the world like people playing at being blind who haven't really got it down. It's impossible to suspend ye old disbelief in this over stylized movie. Including casting of the mother who was such a giant compared to everyone else in the cast and OK she was from another country in reality she seems another species. Some apple carts were needed or something. I couldn't get over the unflagging "wrong look" of the whole dang thing. I don't care for symbolism served up with such an artificial touch. I stopped halfway through to read about it here and some peoples' idea of the people being "blind" in some way is nice but watching the movie... I couldn't get through it. Funny to read reviews I guess something happens to the dog? Something bad! Poor Tobey!

I saw this film when it was released, and I remember the negative reviews. They weren't outright pans, but most complained about the film's jumpiness and inconsistencies. I remember liking the film but having that experience afterward that I hadn't really caught everything. After having now seen it four times, I have come to truly appreciate it.The two things really holding it together are writer/director Peploe's one-of-a-kind story and little Ben Keyworth's unbelievably deft performance as the protagonist who is slowly going blind.What's awesome about Keyworth's performance is his pitch-perfect reactions and expressions. They perfectly bottle a portrait of a severely depressed, extremely terrified young man who is simultaneously fighting as a mini-superhero to both save his life and flee his fears. My jaw dropped when I read people's interpretations of his performance as affectless and...snotty??? O-kay...there's someone whose imagination has the depth of a wading pool! And this is why the movie bombed...as many people have highlighted, you need to be watching every frame of this movie to really follow it. It's not an easy entertainment. Then again, I can't think of many other films that effectively start as a very creepy slasher film and then morph into a psychological exploration of impending psychosis. You have to let it take you on the journey and drop your preconceptions of what it should be, which is extremely hard for, I would say, 80% of the potential audience.This movie has some great iconographic visuals, most notably the shot of Keyworth tapping the knitting needle on his opaque glass lenses. It is both ominous and rather heart-rending once you understand just what he's doing. Would have made a great movie poster. But again...marketing.

AFRAID OF THE DARK is a very subtle, very off-beat film...as you might expect from the directorial hand of Mark Peploe, who writes screenplays for Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR) and Antonioni (THE PASSENGER). James Fox and Fanny Ardant (as the father and mother) have never been better; David Thewlis and Robert Stephens are deliciously creepy.Viewers expecting anything like a traditional thriller or horror film may be thrown for a loop--in the very best way. Metaphors about blindness and vision are all through the film, providing a kind of layered richness that was more common in the best films of the 1960s (such as Antonioni's BLOWUP). The story is not quite what it appears to be, and the way the film pulls a twist to reveal the "reality" is a stunner!

The movie is very unusual, and the images were very striking. I couldn't help but think of The Reflecting Skin while watching this movie, as it too is full of odd imagery, and what, at least to me, appear to be delusions by the main character.Things returning to "normal" suddenly at the end got me, but this film is so dark that it HAS to get better somehow.