Very Cool!!!

To me, this movie is perfection.

Good concept, poorly executed.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Be careful reading the reviews on this one, I watched this with the advantage of having never seen 'repulsion' and it must be said I seldom if ever watch a movie in black and white especially if modern.Having said that I'm an avid Horror fan and taken at face value the movie delivers quite well. It is slow, (ie: at times bludgeoningly so) but is very atmospheric. The wife and I both watched it all the way thru which says much as we often will gong movies before the halfway point (mutually.Desperately striving to match movies of a bygone era it does not always fall short, a good watch, probably more-so alone at night and during a distant storm...There is an additional scene midway thru end credits don't forget to stay that long if you make it to the end.

Shot in black n white, arranged in non-chronological order, and evidently influenced by Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy (especially Repulsion), there is no denying that Darling is a stylishly directed feature but in its overambitious attempt to homage the notable horror classic, it ends up becoming an overbearing & convoluted mess.Set in New York, the story of Darling follows an unnamed young woman who agrees to house sit at a large mansion that appears to have a notorious past. With nothing to do & unable to kill time, she begins to lose her grasp on reality as the extended exposure to the isolation that abounds the empty mansion triggers her descent into madness.Written & directed by Mickey Keating, Darling is his tribute to the atmospheric chillers of the 1960s but the film lacks an identity of its own. Throughout its 78 minutes runtime, it applies tricks such as sporadically cutting to maniacal frames, screeching noises for its score & mindless meandering but all its intricacy lies only on the surface, for it is hollow from the inside.The monochrome filters, confined setting & clever use of camera do manage to bring an unsettling element into the picture but the narrative is simply out of focus and fails to capitalise on that. The only one who is actually able to redeem something out of this whole clutter is Lauren Ashley Carter who tries her best to make her character work and chips in with a violent performance.On an overall scale, Darling finds its filmmaker succeeding at replicating the look of Repulsion but he is unable to add the same level of thematic depth which turned that psychological horror into a genre classic. Deficient in numerous storytelling aspects & pretending to be something it isn't, this artistic endeavour bounces all over the place yet in the end, finds itself not far from where it started. Skip it.

This movie is a psychological thriller and a great one. The story and setting are simple which makes it even more interesting as well as the black and white film. The trouble with 'Darling' becomes apparent later in the movie. The acting is fantastic! Darlings descent into madness is beautifully drawn out through her isolation and only periodic phone calls from her employer. Whether her madness was brought on by the possible demonic activity in the house or her own past mental inability is unclear but it only adds to the mystery. There is also the possibility that the man she encounters meerly resembles that of a man from her past that she feels necessary to take out revenge on for what he did to her in the past.

The first part (I only watched it for 30 minutes, got grossed out by graphic stabbing scene) was good.Great acting and camera work.I'll go back, see the rest another time! I only learned Sean Young in is the movie as "Madame" after I researched to the movie on WWW.IMDb.Com.I doubt "Madame" as the landlady seen at the start of the movie in the opening scene with Lauren Carter (the star of the movie who played "Darling," and did a great job!). Sean Young was a great beauty when she was a young girl in Bladerunner (1982) and No Way Out (1988), and is only in her 50's, probably is still good looking. The landlady I saw was not, but who knows? Maybe Sean had a lot of makeup on or fell on hard times. I only saw about 20 minutes of so of the movie (until the part where "Darling" violently stabs a guy she picks up in a bar.....nice "regular guy" type guy who didn't expect to be murdered!).I saw this movie in a strange movie house for experimental movies called "Zoetropolis" located at 315 James. St. in Lancaster PA USA, and had just come from a terrible dinner I ate (and paid $60 for at the Lancaster Arts Hotel very near the Zoetropolis location (which movie house is in an old industrial building and doubles as Yoga teaching place!).The candy I bought before the movie at the Zoetropolis for $3 was also terrible, and the after taste of the bad dinner didn't go away.All this made it hard to watch the movie and give it a chance. I was jumpy, and couldn't stomach the slasher stabbing scene (I'm a retired 72 year old movie actor, and never got used to the modern slasher horror movies the younger people love so much and can't get enough of ....Nightmare On Elm St. and all the movies which came after that for decades!).I really did like the opening of the movie, which reminded me of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1980) movie showing New York City (Manhattan) in black and white outdoor scenes on a wet day, the office and apt. buildings, etc. etc. Great images.I also liked pretty Lauren Carter. She plays "Darling" and does a very good job.She is very pretty, very big eyes like an old time "Keene" drawing of orphan girls with big eyes.She is very short (only 5'1") and the photographer didn't hide that well, or try to hide it at all.She might become a pro model is the short stature doesn't get in her way, or if she can sell employers on shooting around the fact there is not much of her there.She is very pretty, and has good curves in all the right places. There is a frontal nude scene from the waist up, and she looks very good in that. Could do nude modeling and glamor modeling if she wanted to, and use that clip in her portfolio.I was reminded of Anne Paillard (of France), the famous fashion model (tall and skinny) who became a movie star of fame when she was chosen to play "Nikita," the French govt. paid assassin working for the govt. in the movie titled "Le Femmme Nikita" (1992 or so).Lauren Carter carried the entire part of the movie I saw (about 30 minutes, maybe 30 minutes) and did a very good job. She was a one man band, and that is very hard to pull off....but she did it! I saw the movie at the wrong place (the Zoetropolis Movie Theater located in an industrial building in Lancaster PA at 315 James St.). I went outside to the "lobby" of the Zoetropolis to sit down and recover from the stabbing scene, but the man who sold me my ticket earlier told me to get out of the lobby because a big Yoga Class was going on...in the lobby. About 10 girls, a lady teacher, and a single man...the ticket salesman.