Deeper than Darkness Review
Deeper than Darkness is a 2021 short film directed by Haider Rifaat.
A short horror film that certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, Deeper than Darkness though spends too much time building up to an unsatisfactory conclusion.
Simply put, there really isn’t a lot to take in with this short film. It comes from what can be concluded as a natural place, with the filmmaker being inspired by a quarantine experience in Hawaii, but outside of that small thread of location we are given in the story, nothing else really has any pay off.
The analogy of feeling trapped by the mundane existence that so many have had to face while staying in isolation, as a type of haunting, is interesting enough, but is not really explored here beyond surface level.
Adding to the trouble is a bevy of technical mistakes in the filming itself. Those would be issues with frame rate, color temperature, and poor framing moments. It just further cripples the film, not allowing it to blossom into anything more than a practice run for better things to come with more experience.
The ending moment too is even hampered by this, given what looks like the filmmaker/actor of the film moving back to end a take at the closing of the moment. Either that or trying to hide a brief glimmer of the ghost that was haunting the room. Whatever the case, the result is ultimately the same, just not enough to pay off to warrant the viewing.
Perhaps a few more scenes showing the strange occurrences even during the day to build up to the night time haunting, but we really have a short set up and then right into things getting spooky. While normally this would actually be a good thing as we get to the core of what the film wants to accomplish, but it is almost like a roller coaster that has no lift up a track. We get a rush faster, but it is too quickly undone by its own brevity.
Deeper than Darkness certainly has the making for something better and the core elements to make a spooky short film almost come together, but technical flaws really keep it back from achieving anything much better than what it ends up being.
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Cheers!
Daniel Hess
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