The wooded mountains of Kosovo form the setting for Darkling, Dusan Milic’s genre-inflected exploration of life for Kosovan Serbs still living in the country after the war of the late 90s. A peace accord was signed in 1999 to end the Kosovo war, but with the return to the region of more than a million ethnic Albanians who had been displaced by the war, reprisals against the remaining Serbs occurred despite the presence of the UN’s KFOR peacekeeping force. Utilising the tenets of thrillers and folk horror, Milic paints a portrait of what it was like to be a target of these reprisals, evoking the siege mentality that came with it and the long-term psychological effects the trauma had on those who survived.
Milica (Miona Ilov) lives a plagued existence on a small farm with her mother Vukica (Danica Curcic) and grandfather Milutin (Slavko Stimac). Their modest plot of land is surrounded by trailing barbed wire fences and the house itself is barricaded at night with windows boarded and furniture piled against the door. The power regularly goes out, their telephone often runs out of battery, and the presence of a local Italian peacekeeping force seems to do little to prevent their harassment. They endure because they hold out the hope that Milica’s father and uncle – who both disappeared nearly a year ago when they went out to work the field – will return and the family are determined not to abandon their home until they do.
Right from the opening sequence, Milic does an excellent job of cultivating an atmosphere of genuine unease. An opening voiceover against a black screen – presented as an extract from a letter that Milica will eventually send to the UN to describe their plight – references the power of the darkness they live in. As the picture slowly fades into view, it is held in a dim light where the family wait, hunkered down, in the house while they hear terrifying non-human screams and violent crashing noises from outside. When it is light enough for Milutin to finally go outside with his gun, he finds the barn door torn open, their cow in severe distress and the body of her calf tangled in the perimeter wire. Exactly who or what is terrorising the homestead is left unsaid and although the situation (and a boot print near the calf’s body) suggests local ethnic Albanians, the screenplay leaves this intentionally ambiguous. Recurring shots watching the farm from the confines of the trees suggest eyes surveying but there is no indication of whose they are – or indeed if they are human.
The way that Darkling leaves this as a gnawing mystery is probably its most fascinating and, ultimately, frustrating element. It’s possible to read much of the film as a plainly human spectacle, but there are moments that confound this reading and suggest something more menacing lurking in the woods. Strange inhuman noises emanate from the forest, the physical power of the attacks feels incongruous to aggrieved locals, and when the film reaches its extravagant climax in a thundering downpour, the aggressors seem other than human. At the same time, Milic and his cinematographer Kiril Prodanov pepper their images with vivid colour – this is not a desaturated and dour drama but a film in which even its earthy hues pop or are complemented by bright objects. The green of the trees offers a verdant beauty to this sinister story that can’t help but take on a vague fairy tale or folkloric quality.
The fact that the action is presented primarily from Milica’s perspective makes Darkling an all more complicated and layered meditation on the nature of trauma and the psychological toll it can take. Not only does it arguably present the way a child’s mind interpreted the events and emotionally compensated for them, but it also engages with the othering of ‘enemies’ and the creation of bogeymen. All that said, the opacities also mean that the film can’t quite deliver a conclusion that lives up to the mounting discomfort of its unravelling narrative. It is perhaps the case that where the film exists in the uncertainty between its naturalism and its genre elements, Milic felt he had to appease both parts and, as a result, the conclusion feels dissatisfying and a little unfathomable. Prior to that, though, he has crafted a genuinely tense and unsettling film with some quite keen psychological implications.
Director, screenwriter: Dusan Milic
Cast: Miona Ilov, Slavko Stimac, Danica Curcic
Producers: Snezana van Houwelingen
Cinematography: Kiril Prodanov
Editing: Yannis Chalkiadakis
Music: Kristien Eidnes Andersen
Production companies: Film Deluxe International, This and That Productions, Firefly Productions (all Serbia), RFF International (Bulgaria), Space Rocket Nation (Denmark), A_Lab (Italy), and Graal SA (Greece).
Venue: Palm Springs International Film Festival (Awards Buzz)
In Serbian, Italian and English with English subtitles
103 minutes
