Does not deliver on its premise

Rating: 3/10 (26 November 2016)

I wanted to like it, I really did. But here's the thing - the real Barrow is 60% Native Alaskan. Yet, if you watched this film, you'd think it was 95% Caucasian. There's a couple of token glimpses of Inupiat kids near the start, and there's one character who's allowed to loiter in the background til he gets his head chopped off with an axe. But this is a film with no interest in what life in an Arctic community is really like.
Which - racism aside - might be fine in a stylised genre movie, if the coolness of the basic premise was delivered on. But it isn't.
Barrow - isolated on the far northern edge of Alaska, with a month of sunless darkness - is attacked by vampires! Sounds great, but the trouble is, there is very little sense of landscape, the barren midnight wastes from which attack might come. Everything looks like a back lot or a digital set extension, apart from a couple of location scenes. The story has no interest in where the vampires came from or why they are here.
And I got no feeling for the life of the town before or during the attack. The little people are disposed of during one long aerial shot of vampire carnage. What remains are just a couple of white cops, and some other similar people whose main job is to exchange scared looks. I kept wishing the denouement of the film would be when a bunch of hard-as-nails Inupiat stormed out of their houses and saved the cast, but no such luck.
And as for the 'darkness' bit - the whole film looks like it is enacted under supermarket strip lights. Is that moonlight? Why are the town's streets so brightly lit, when the sky is shown as midnight black and cloudy? Why, in an abandoned house, with the windows boarded up and the power cut, is everything as bright as day? I sense the dead hand of some exec here telling the DP and the colourist to brighten everything up. Which was the worst decision possible. Fear of the dark is possibly the strongest human fear. But this film should've been called '30 Days (or was it 3?) of Over-Lighting'.