Robert Fuest’s And Soon the Darkness is a taut, precision-crafted Hitchcockian thriller, drawing particular inspiration from one of the master of suspense’s most famous sequences: the crop-duster scene in North by Northwest. Like that now-classic set piece, Fuest’s film builds an escalating sense of menace and imminent danger from a confrontation with a location’s wide open spaces and bright sunshine. Only here the setting is rural France, and we’re accompanying two English girls on an ill-fated cycling holiday.
The film’s setup is archetypal. In addition to being proverbial strangers in a strange land, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) are a temperamentally mismatched pair. Jane is rigid and regimented, maybe even a trifle priggish, while Cathy’s more freewheeling and open to the possibilities around her. And Soon the Darkness establishes the dynamic of their relationship right out of the gate, under the opening credits, before the audience has even heard a single line of dialogue: Jane suddenly swerves off onto a side road and Cathy, after realizing what’s happened, backtracks and dutifully follows her friend.
The young women’s attitudes toward the opposite sex are also neatly established by visually rhymed sequences: When Jane rides by a trio of policemen who openly admire her, her downcast eyes and wry smile telegraph her prim-and-proper demeanor. Passing a darkly handsome fellow on a moped, Cathy stops in the middle of the road and does a protracted, frankly voracious double take. The fact that the girls work as nurses in an obstetrics ward, and later discuss the death of a newborn, only adds to the queasy atmosphere of sexuality and its possibly unpleasant consequences that hangs over the film.
Cathy abruptly goes missing at about the 40-minute mark, after the girls separate owing to an argument over their itinerary, in a narrative move that clearly echoes, not so coincidentally, Hitchcock’s Psycho. The rest of the film has Jane frantically cycling along the same lonely stretch of road between two remote villages, with stops at the ominous copse of woods where Cathy disappeared. Along the way, Jane encounters a handful of off-kilter characters, each of whom provides a convenient sort of red herring for the proceedings.
Foremost among them is the aforementioned moped rider, Paul (Sandor Elès), who offers to help find Cathy, claiming to be an officer in the French Sûreté. Elès plays the character on the fine edge between solicitous and potentially dangerous. And then an expat British schoolmarm (Clare Kelly), who may have a more than protective interest in Jane, warns her about a homicide that occurred on the same stretch of road three years before. “It was more than murder,” the woman practically purrs, “if you know what I mean.”
Fuest augments the film’s aura of unease through precise framing and a sinuously mobile camera, often using Fordian shots to emphasize the wide, flat expanses of the countryside, effectively isolating a lone figure against the immense backdrop of all that open space. Alternately, he favors extreme close-ups, in the vein of Sergio Leone, that play up a character’s discomfort upon finding themselves in an uncertain, often dangerously confined space.
And Soon the Darkness climaxes in a dazzlingly mounted game of three-way cat-and-mouse set among a clutch of abandoned buses and mobile homes. Cinematographer Ian Wilson gets to deploy some seriously noirish shadow play, and there’s even a moment that eerily presages a similar scene in John Carpenter’s Halloween. The ultimate revelation of the killer’s identity, whether or not it comes as a complete surprise, cleverly plays into the era’s profound distrust of authority figures. And the film’s penultimate shot conveys an unexpected pang of melancholy, before the ending effectively circles back around to the film’s beginning in a manner that confers a gratifying sense of open-endedness.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber debuts a new 4K master of And Soon the Darkness that looks positively smashing, with the vibrant greens of the landscape and the primary hues of the girls’ clothing really popping in HD. The Master Audio stereo track is very good, with no hiss or distortion apparent, clearly conveying the dialogue—including passages in French that remain untranslated to help augment the film’s atmosphere of alienation. Laurie Johnson’s terrific score modulates from the incongruously jaunty title track (which is cleverly reprised at a later point on Cathy’s portable radio) to lots of ominously fluttering flutes and staccato string effects later in the film that owe a clear debt to Bernard Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock.
Extras
The archival commentary track by director Robert Fuest and co-writer and producer Brian Clemens, moderated by Jonathan Sothcott, covers the autobiographical experiences and archetypal fears that fed into the screenplay, the decision to extend the location shoot in order to maximize the film’s broody verisimilitude, casting choices (Clemens comes down pretty hard—and pretty unfairly—on Elès in particular), as well as more technical information about decisions regarding lighting, blocking and camera movement. There’s much discussion about most members of the crew transitioning directly from the TV series The Avengers to this film, and an intriguing digression into Fuest’s subsequent involvement with American International Pictures on the Dr. Phibes movies. All told, it’s an engaging, informative, frequently wryly humorous listen. The second, newly commissioned commentary track by film historian Troy Howarth opens with some personal comments about his first exposure to the film, then goes on to pay particular attention to the career trajectories of the cast and crew. Howarth makes a cogent argument for And Soon the Darkness as a quasi-giallo thriller with just a touch of the proto-slasher film about it. As usual, Howarth is an articulate, often opinionated guide.
Overall
Robert Fuest’s taut Hitchcockian thriller makes its debut on Blu-ray with a beautiful new transfer and a couple of choice extras.
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