2 gibbles out of 5

Director: Troy Nixey

I understand this is a kid’s movie.  I get that.  But director Guillermo del Toro (I mean, *ahem* Troy Nixey) has flirted with the themes in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” enough that I was expecting something more affecting than what zips by on the screen for 90 minutes.  Alas, del Toro’s production stamp is all over the movie, but poor sound mixing and undercut tension makes this a disappointing view, better as a made-for-TV movie as was the original on which it was based.

Guy Pearce is single dad and Katie Holmes is working partner and girlfriend, the pair real-estate restorationists or whatever the official version is of that, working on the aged Blackwood farm to get it all majestic for re-sale.  In comes lil’ Bailee Madison, Pearce’s daughter, shuttled over to his care (for an indefinite period of time) by the mother as Bailee’s been down lately and a change of scenery is the proposed solution.  Del Toro (co-writer) has gotten much more naturalistic with his dialogue, eschewing some of the scenery-chewing that popped up in earlier films.  While Pearce’s and Holmes’ performances are sort of wooden (surprising for Pearce, not so much for Katie), the dialogue between all of the characters at least feels real, preventing anyone from coming across as whole-heartedly evil, or good, or smart, or stupid.  If the adult performances all feel a little staged, Bailee Madison steals the show.  She carries herself magnificently well through most of the proceedings, finding a balance between curiosity and terror that’s hard to get kids to accurately portray without mugging it up (which she does, but it’s rare enough to not be bothersome).

But this balance doesn’t extend to the plotting.  We essentially have a haunted house film, with the haunting provided by creatures which live beneath the basement.  Some of these films leave the “rules” by which the hauntings occur open, some films give some particulars which they stick to until a plot-hole laden conclusion.  “Don’t Be Afraid” tries to strike a balance by giving us backstory and rules and then letting the creatures take over the film, but the lack of consequences for the plot’s stipulations renders the creatures’ impotent on-screen.  And, bummer, since they’re entirely CGI and we see them fairly often, the shock of a slow reveal or even the scuttling-in-the-dark creepiness that could’ve been played up is lost.

And let’s just stack up the bad: perhaps it was just the DVD, but the sound mixing was awful.  Everything plays on the same level, making all of the dialogue flat and shaving the edges off the atmospheric sound effects.  The only plus side is that Marco Beltrami’s score gets a boost.  Beltrami is new on my radar, but the last few films where I’ve noticed his music have always been for positive reasons: he tweaks the bombast of a generic hollywood score by adding weird twists and elements at just the right moments.

So again, I get that this is a kid’s movie.  And I wasn’t expecting massive scares: when del Toro used the same concepts in Devil’s Backbone or Pan’s Labyrinth, we weren’t scared, we were just pleased at his capturing of that wonder and horror of childhood, and his use of his imagination to create really beautiful worlds to show us on film.  The environment is there in “Don’t Be Afraid,” but director Troy Nixey doesn’t have the patience to use it in the same way, taking one quick swoop of our set and then rushing us into jump scares that pass by before they can have impact.  It cheapens the film, and doesn’t respect the fantasy in the same way that del Toro’s better films have.

Oh well.

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