A small tribe of Stone Age explorers fight for their lives against deadly unseen predators in Out of Darkness, a gripping exercise in Paleolithic horror from British director Andrew Cumming and screenwriter Ruth Greenberg. Set 45,000 years ago, with all dialogue delivered in a fictionalised prehistoric language, Cumming’s film plainly has artistic ambitions beyond its underlying slasher-style narrative. There are nods to the New Testament, Old Norse sagas and Game of Thrones here, not least because co-star Chuku Modu is a GoT veteran. But there are also echoes of classic elevated genre pieces like Alien (1979) and The Thing (1983), where an elemental landscape becomes a universal canvas and a man-against-monster plot assumes heightened allegorical resonance.
Filmed under Covid restrictions in a majestically desolate corner of the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness was premiered at the 2022 London Film Festival under its original title The Origin. It comes with classy credentials: producer Oliver Kassman previously garnered prize-winning success and widespread acclaim with Saint Maud (2019), an eerie psychological thriller written and directed by Rose Glass. Featuring many of the same creative team, Cumming’s Paleolithic period piece is another cerebral shocker from another first-time feature director, with enough style and originality to lure both art-house and genre-friendly crowds. World premiering at London Film Festival this week, it feels primed for cult success.
Framed as a folklore fable told around a flickering bonfire, Out of Darkness follows a band of nomadic hunter-gatherers desperately searching for food and shelter on a remote, rugged, pitiless tundra landscape. Their authoritarian leader is Adem (Modu), whose macho kill-or-be-killed philosophy eventually leads the group into mortal peril. Also in this small fractious clan are Adem’s more sensitive younger brother Geirr (Kit Young) and the pregnant Ave (Iola Evans), who is carrying Adem’s child. Another tribe member, 15-year-old Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), has just begun menstruating, which more superstitious members of the group fear will attract malevolent demons.
This dark prophecy appears to come true when Adem’s pre-teen son Heron, played in an impressive gender-swap performance by the young female Swiss-British actor Luna Mwezi, is abducted by a shadowy phantom menace during a nocturnal raid. The next morning, Adem’s search party leads the group into dense woodland, where their invisible enemy is waiting to pick them off one by one. This section of the film is familiar slasher-horror terrain, and Cumming sticks pretty firmly within genre convention. That said, the restrained use of bloody violence is deftly handled, making a grisly prosthetic injury sequence all the more effective, while a brief detour into cannibalism is framed more as hard-nosed moral dilemma than sensational gore-fest.
Among the key consultants who worked with Cumming and Greenberg on Out of Darkness was Dr. Rob Dinnis, an archaeologist who advised the film-makers on the movements and social habits of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, lending credence to the cast’s mixed-heritage ethnic make-up. Another academic, multi-lingual poet and historian Dr. Daniel Andersson, helped devise the fictional “Tola” language for the characters based on a blend of Arabic, Basque and Sanskrit. The risky choice to shoot an entire film in a subtitled, confected tongue could have been an alienating gimmick, but it has worked before on Quest for Fire (1981), Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) and others. This linguistic conceit soon starts to feel pretty natural, largely thanks to solid, nuanced, committed performances. Oakley-Green and Mwezi prove particularly expressive here, lending emotional force to each line.
Out of Darkness follows a propulsive, linear narrative that arguably promises more than it delivers, a teasing accumulation of supernatural horror hints and monster-movie jump scares climaxing with a fairly prosaic lesson about human compassion and empathy, adding a modern, liberal, quasi-feminist twist to an otherwise pitiless prehistoric bloodbath. This resolution sits a little oddly with the brutal survivalist ethos that has driven the plot so far, but not so jarringly as to derail the film. In any case, minor plot bumps are mostly excused by strong performances from a cast of young, largely unknown players and vivid cinematography by Saint Maud veteran Ben Fordesman, who frames the bleakly beautiful Scottish wilderness with striking overhead drone shots and upside-down angles. An avant-rock score by Adam Janota Bzowski, another Saint Maud graduate, leans towards the overly literal with its animalistic moans and bellicose percussive rattles, but still proves effective as an extra source of nerve-jangling tension.
Director: Andrew Cumming
Screenwriter: Ruth Greenberg
Cast: Safia Oakley-Green, Kit Young, Chuku Modu, Iola Evans, Arno Lüning, Luna Mwezi
Producer: Oliver Kassman
Cinematographer: Ben Fordesman
Editor: Paulo Pandolpho
Production designer: Jamie Lapsley
Costume designer: Michael O’Connor
Production companies: Escape Plan (UK)
World sales: Sony
Venue: BFI London Film Festival (Cult)
In: “Tola” (fictional language)
87 minutes
