Is Dark Places Gillian Flynn’s Second Hit Film or First Flop?

When it comes to writing gripping fiction that translates seamlessly to the screen, Gillian Flynn is hitting it out of the park. Her 2012 novel Gone Girl became one of the most acclaimed films of 2014 with Flynn penning the screenplay herself, cementing her a place in both the literary and film world as an auteur of dark, twisting-and-turning thrillers that please both audience and critics alike.

While Dark Places (now in theaters and on demand via DirecTV), adapted from Flynn’s 2009 novel of the same name, is not adapted by Flynn’s hand, it closely follows her hazy, quiet style of building a mystery while keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. Dark Places follows Libby Day (Charlize Theron), the only survivor of the “Kansas Prairie Massacre” that ended the lives of her mother and two sisters when she was eight years old. Her brother Ben (Corey Stoll channeling his best nervous Peter Sarsgaard) is in prison for the murder, but people still doubt his involvement. Libby, who is living off donations and fund money from sympathetic supporters, agrees to join hobby investigator Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) to a meeting of the “Kill Club,” a group of people whose main source of entertainment is solving cold-case crimes and finding justice for the falsely accused. For a price, she agrees to visit Ben in prison to talk about the fated night.

The film follows two time periods—the mid-1980′s in farm-crisis country and present day in Kansas City. Christina Hendricks plays Patty Day with a quiet desperation, always seeming on the verge of tears as she deals with raising her family in rural poverty as a single mother. Her final decision to save her family shows her strength of character, but the resolution falls a bit flat for audiences, recalling a brief scene at the beginning of the film when the Kill Club examines a mid-80′s rural serial killer in one of the most blatant pieces of foreshadowing in film history.

One of the best pieces of acting comes from young Chloë Grace Moretz as teenage Ben’s pregnant girlfriend Diondra. Moretz brings buoyancy to an otherwise stereotypical poor-little-rich-girl character, and the casting of Andrea Roth as her older counterpart is eerily spot-on. The most interesting and complex character is Theron’s Libby. She’s mean and foul-mouthed, hiding under the brim of a baseball cap and scowling with mistrust at everyone who crosses her path, but she’s the character audiences identify with the most.

It’s hard to differentiate Flynn’s work from Gone Girl director David Fincher’s similar style, mainly because they work so seamlessly together. But Gilles Paquet-Brenner does an admirable job of both capturing the Dark Places characters onscreen and writing them in the screenplay. The film is cast in somber blues and street-lamp oranges, the 1985 scenes rolling with classic rock. There’s an edge to even the gentler shots, such as rottweilers barking furiously during a rushed sex scene, and Paquet-Brenner deftly handles the multitude of emotions that come across the characters as the story unfolds. It’s a gritty film, steeped in realism and all-too-familiar headlines of the 1980′s like farm foreclosures and the teenage Satanism scare, but it never falls into melancholy.

Right away, Dark Places had the arduous task of going up against Gone Girl in terms of Flynn’s adaptations, but it fills a class of its own. It’s less cruel than Gone Girl, a little gentler with it’s characters, but it still stuns and pleases audiences with the lengths people will go to protect themselves and others.

About Elizabeth Eckhart

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Elizabeth Eckhart is a film and entertainment blogger that was born and raised in Chi Town, Illinois. She likes fantasy, especially, as well as sci-fi and other genres of fictional stories.

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