The elemental tale of man versus nature is one that we’ve been telling since the days of cave paintings. The tale of man versus a big, scary creature has been one of that tradition’s most reliably entertaining iterations since the dawn of Hollywood, and Andrew Cumming’s Stone Age thriller Out of Darkness makes for a worthy addition.
The film is set 45,000 years ago. After making a daring journey across the sea, a small band of Stone Agers have arrived in an unfamiliar place that they hope to call home. Sadly, this place isn’t the land of milk, honey, and warm, cozy caves that they’d been dreaming of. Rather, it’s a gray and barren place where rough, rocky hills seem to roll out endlessly in all directions. It makes for a dispiriting landscape during the day, and it’s even worse when darkness falls and the shrieking of some unknown creature can be heard ringing through the night.
An early campfire scene efficiently introduces us to each member of the group. Their headstrong chief, Adem (Chuku Modu), is confident that their journey will still bear fruit, and that he and his spear can handle any danger that comes their way. His partner, Ave (Iola Evans), trusts him, though she’s beginning to worry about her unborn child. Meanwhile, Odal (Arno Luening), an elder who sends up “I will betray you” vibes, is less optimistic about their prospects.
The rest of the group consists of Adem and Ave’s son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), Adem’s timid younger brother, Geirr (Kit Young), and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a young girl who the group have adopted. As a “stray,” she has no status within their makeshift tribe, and Adem and Odal both take a sinister pleasure in reminding her that she’s there “for whatever we need.”
As the group ventures further inland in search of food and shelter, the creature begins picking them off one by one. Increasingly desperate and with nowhere to run or hide, they hatch a series of plans to try and either appease the beast or kill it. When these efforts are unsuccessful, the gory results are captured through delightfully gross make-up effects.
In the basic rhythms of its story, Out of Darkness plays out like a Predator movie, and watching the main characters get hunted from the shadows is satisfying in the same primal way—a tense game of cat and mouse as we wait to see who the creature gets next and how exactly it gets them. The thing that elevates Cumming’s film above many of those that take their cues from John McTiernan’s iconic actioner (including some of its own sequels) is its striking scenery.
Shot in the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness draws on the eerie atmosphere of a place that still feels ancient and steeped in mystery. The film makes great use of this natural resource, capturing the landscape in sweeping wide shots during the day and then allowing it to vanish into complete darkness at night, rendering anything more than a few feet from the tribe’s campfire totally invisible. At one point, Beyah stands before the mouth of a cave, the background illuminated behind her as the rocks in front form a cracked, black frame—a Paleolithic take on the famous doorway shot from John Ford’s The Searchers.
As a creature feature working without a huge supply of digital effects, Out of Darkness wisely follows the lead of its most esteemed ancestor, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and makes sure to keep the monster out of sight for as long as possible. When the reveal finally comes, though, it’s a little underwhelming—for turning the antagonist into a metaphor for the violent nature of man that’s about as sophisticated as Adem’s spear and not quite so sharp. It’s a disappointing place to arrive at after such a thrilling journey through the Highlands, though Oakley-Green’s scrappy, committed performance helps to carry the film through this clumsy last leg.
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