Dark Places

Plot synopsis:
Libby Day, the novel's narrator and protagonist, is the sole survivor of a massacre in Kinnakee, Kansas, a fictional rural town. After witnessing the murders of her two sisters and mother, in what appears to be a Satanic cult ritual, she escapes through a window and later testifies in court against her teenage brother.
Twenty-five years after the massacre, Libby, in need of money, meets with a group of amateur investigators who believe that her brother is innocent of the crime. At their coaxing, she meets her brother, Ben for the first time, but is not convinced that he didn't do it. She also meets with her father, now homeless, but is not convinced he played a part in it either. Through her investigation, she learns of her brother's secret girlfriend, as well as accusations against him for child molestation.
Interspersed with the modern day investigation are flashbacks to the day of the massacre. These flashbacks are told from the points of view of Libby's mother, Patty, and her convicted brother, Ben. Patty's viewpoints discuss the difficulties of trying to keep the family farm while raising four children alone; Ben tells the story of a troubled teenager as he falls in with a bad crowd. These viewpoints paint a picture of a grim life of desperate poverty, marital abuse and abandonment that characterize life on the farm prior to the murder.

Tags: violence, murder, flashback

Review:
I actually liked Dark Places better, so when I found out they were making it into a movie, I was of course skeptical about whether or not it'd be good.
The sets were also very accurate - it's been YEARS since I read the book, but while watching the movie everything came back to me...the layout of the farm house, the crappy apartment Libby lived in as an adult with her collection of stolen items...all the way down to crap hole Runner was living in...This is not going to be a big blockbuster.
She gets contacted by a club that is intrigued by mysterious murders, and she is forced to confront her multilayered traumatic past."Dark Places" is a truly haunting drama that keeps me captivated thoroughly.
Each switch back to 1985 is like the tumblers on a lock giving that satisfying click as you pick it, breeding anticipation and certainty that there is a rich reward at the end for your efforts, every scene evoking a subtle revelation that drives the story onward.Well cast, well scored, well directed, Dark Places deserves more recognition than it has garnered.
The rest of the cast is good but Christina Hendricks and Corey Stoll stand out and elevate the film.So to me Dark Places really depicts how prejudices, despair, and a bunch of white lies can snow ball and change people's lives forever.
Ungodly and sinister, Gillian Flynn's Dark Places is just as devilish as you hope.Again Gillian Flynn takes inspiration from the headlines, this time Dark Places sheds unsettling and ominous light on the famed mass murders that capture society's attention.When Libby Day (Charlize Theron) was just seven years old, she was the lone survivor and he family was viciously murdered in what the media claimed was a satanic occult sacrifice at the desolate farmhouse in Kansas.
Twenty-five years later, in desperate need of cash and with no way to get it except capitalize and exploit her seedy past, she allows an organization obsessed with real life murders investigate the case with her help, as they hope to exonerate Ben. As she investigates her past, she opens old wounds and uncovers things about her life she had long since buried deep in her soul.Not being able to speak of the novel, the Dark Places as a film does a great job of leading you on myriad paths of misdirection.
Her Libby and the medley of supporting characters are gripping and match the brutal content of the film.Dark Places is a satisfying mystery that tells of savage desperation and sadistic cold-hearted murder.
I did not read Dark Places nor Gone Girl (the other Flynn's book) but I can really said that movie is slow but captivating.
Her character does not shine like the female character in Gone Girl; in fact her character is really an accessory to the story that basically happens in flash backs.As a murder mystery; the end is somewhat unexpected but not completely convincing; but it is obvious that the important thing was the sadness, misery and tough decisions some of the characters had to make and its consequences.It is an interesting slow cooked movie; far from commercial but worth seeing anyway.
It doesn't nearly deserve the terrible reputation it is receiving right now.For a basic plot summary, "Dark Places" tells the story of Libby Day (Charlize Theron), a woman still haunted by the memory of a childhood incident in which her brother murdered the rest of the family...or did he?
They both have a pretty respectable cast (even Chloe Moretz has a key role in this), they both feature a psychological thriller/mystery at the heart of the narrative, and both are thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end.So, why did "Gone Girl" soar while "Dark Places" puttered out?
It felt a little bit cobbled together and stunted when it could have been just as great and nuanced as its Flynn-inspired predecessor.Overall, though, "Dark Places" is a pretty solid movie that (for whatever reason) gained such a bad reputation that it flopped early and often.
From 2015, "Dark Places" stars Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks, and Corey Stoll in an adaptation of a novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl).Theron is Libby Day, one of two living survivors of the mass murder of her family in 1985 in Kansas.
It has to be done right away because storage problems in the state building mean that cases more than ten years old will be destroyed in a few weeks.Flashbacks recreate the circumstances surrounding the murders, showing her mother (Hendricks) trying to hold onto their farm despite poverty, her alcoholic husband who shows up for money, Ben being accused of child molestation and of practicing Satanism, and Ben's relationship with Diondra (Chloe Grace Moretz), who seems to be the town bad girl.Slowly Libby is able to put the pieces together and learns the stunning truth.I don't understand the vilification of this movie - what has it ever done to anyone?
She prefers to make films that are not about her gorgeous looks, and this was one.Christina Hendricks does a great job as Libby's downtrodden mother - she looks and acts defeated - a far cry from being one of the glamorous stars of "Mad Men."For fans of this genre, and I gather for people who haven't read the book, I think this is a very well done film that deserves to be seen as a rental or on Amazon streaming..
I guess the story was flushed out quite well by the filmmaker.The film had a lot of cool elements too.Charlize Theron plays Libby Day, the lone survivor of a massacre done by her brother of their entire family.
There's dark tones everywhere you look from the Satanism themes, the struggling family murdered in cold blood, a kill club that get their kicks from solving crimes and front and centre Charlize Theron's Libby Day, the grown up survivor of the family murder that gives a testimony that imprisoned her older brother for the crime but in a convoluted story that seemingly worked quite well in book format gets lost in a shoddily edited and unveiling cinematic narrative.Much of the films failings can be placed squarely at the feet of director Paquet-Brenner who unlike Fincher seems to lack any single amount of vision for this event.
Much of the film fails unequivocally and is saved only by a decent Theron turn as the feisty Libby and some nice support from Tye Sheridan as the young Ben Day and Corey Stoll as the older incarnation.
Other performers in the piece get lost in a mistreated retelling of the source material with yet another OTT turn from Chloe Grace Moretz front and centre in this aspect.Uninvolving, lacking any energy and most tellingly just downright boring, Dark Places barely feels like it belongs in the league of cinematic thrillers and in the end comes off as a cheap and nasty TV movie that is notched up a peg on the ratings scale thanks to some Hollywood talent that deserve better material to work with.2 sacrificial cows out of 5.
To be honest the distance from the main character of Dark Places and Gone Girl shows the key difference between the film adaptations.
Dark Places (like a lot of movies, I guess) won't be everyone's cup of tea as it's a pretty slow-paced Thriller that concentrates on a decent cast delivering a good story.
If you're more into faster-paced films then you more than likely won't enjoy this.The story sees Charlize Theron play Libby Day, a young woman who believes that her brother brutally killed her mother and sister when she was 8-years-old.
Also, while there is no twist as such, the story does keep you guessing as to how it will pan out.The cast all do a decent job with their individual parts as well, from Theron's performance as Libby Day, a woman who finds it hard to trust anyone and has become a bit of a recluse, to Chloë Grace Moretz's performance of a young manipulative Diondra.
Put a decent cast in to deliver a decent story and you have yourself a pretty enjoyable movie.As I mentioned earlier, it is a pretty slow-paced Thriller, and while I don't mind watching these, there were a few scenes where I thought it dragged a wee bit, but for the most part it is interesting and enjoyable enough.It's not the best film you'll ever see, but Dark places is a good film that is definitely worth a watch..
Now, I always disliked that typical and clichéd statement: "the book is much better than the film", but I must admit that there's truth in it Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner's screenplay adaptation is very loyal to Flynn's novel, and thus the basic subject matter is tense and unsettling, but for some inexplicable reason the book is compelling whereas the film is rather tedious "Dark Places" tells the story of Libby Day. At the tender age of 7, Libby witnessed how her mother and two sisters were brutally slain in their Kansas farm at night, and she confirmed to the authorities that her 15-year-old brother Ben was the culprit.
Even though they aren't discussed in the story, these facts and their long-term repercussions lead to the problems that we see play out in one small community, and within one family in particular, in "Dark Places" (R, 1:53).When she was a young girl, Libby Day was in her family's rural Kansas home when her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered.
As the film progresses, we see the list of possible suspects in the murders steadily grow and then gradually shrink as we learn more and more about what really happened in that farmhouse on that fateful night in 1985."Dark Places" is based on the novel that Gillian Flynn wrote before "Gone Girl", but this second film based on one of her books isn't as good as the first.
(Flynn adapted her own novel for the film version of "Gone Girl", and received an Oscar nomination for her efforts, but little-known French filmmaker Gilles Paquet-Brenner, this movie's director, also took on the screen writing duties here.) Inside "Dark Places" there's a great film trying to find its way out, but it's hampered by uneven acting and mediocre directing.
(Reminder: As always when reviewing a movie, I don't comment on the quality of the book's story, just on what appears on the screen.)Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult look very different than when they appeared together in "Mad Max: Fury Road" (most of which was filmed a year before this movie), but their performances aren't as effective or compelling as in the "Mad Max" reboot.
Libby (Charlize Theron), her dead beat father Runner Day (Sean Bridgers) and her imprisoned brother Ben (Corey Stoll) who were both suspects in the murders but eventually the young teenaged son Ben would be convicted of the three (3) murders and spend the rest of his life behind bars.Was justice really served by imprisoning young Ben Day or will Lyle Wirth and his freak cult of criminal investigators uncover what really happened that night in 1985 on a Kansas City farm with the paid for information supplied by the then 8 year old survivor Libby Day?
This is an excellent film, with dark undertones, with a brother/sister relationship that was strained from the very day the guilty plea was read out in court to Ben Day. So the adult Libby is instructed by her employer Lyle Wirth to go to the prison and talk to her estranged brother Ben to seek real closure on what happened that night 30 years ago that changed their lives forever.This is a story that although is fiction, has real life undertones of self worth, pity, hatred, youth influenced by passion and fear, love/hate family relationships, and by cult like groups who when you dig deeper serve a real purpose in society ensuring justice can prevail, albeit sometimes too late to save a young and naive teenager.
With the success of Gone Girl, film producers have been scrambling to adapt other works from novelist Gillian Flynn.However this adaptation of Dark Places by French Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner lacks the style, tension and panache of Dave Fincher's superior adaptation of Gone Girl.Libby Day (Charlize Theron) as a 7 year old survived an attack on her family home which left her mother and two sisters dead.
First of all don't expect to see a better film than gone girl (the the book by Gillian Flynn) I saw this film last night, and I can say is that is a good film, better than the book, the cast it's good but apart from Charlize Theron (who make a great interpretation of Libby day)and Chloe Moretz( that give a tremendous performance of Diondra) the other characters are in the movie like 10 minutes tops, I don't know why they put Nicholas Hoult in the top billed cast if he is hardly in the movie.The direction it's not very good, but it gets along with the movie, then if you haven't read the book the plot it's gonna surprise you in the end, it's not a great twist like in gone girl but it's tolerable, sure you expect more, but i think it's some kind of predictable ending.In the end dark places turns out to be to the movie that everyone expect to be..
When Charlize Theron's character gets forced to take a new look at her family's murder thirty years earlier, it's but one example of the inevitable.It's an OK movie, not a masterpiece.
Dark Places is exactly that, a dark eerie film about the life of Libby Day. The movie starts out slow as the build up takes you through the story, nicely put together and the only things that I didn't feel fit were the reminisces of the past where the film style changed and didn't quite blend in.The acting for the most part was very well played, and of course Charlize Theron pulled her weight as always.
What drew me to this film however wasn't the genre nor the fact that Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult were going to be in this movie together again after their success in Fury Road, but that the screenplay was adapted from Gillian Flynn's novel of the same name.
Dark Places isn't as tightly constructed as Gone Girl and the characters aren't as interesting, but the mystery still had me engaged during most of the film's running time.
I just read the book and decided to watch the movie, thinking that with this strong compelling story the film would be great.
I know that in order to make a movie you have to cut a lot of things out of a book, but it feels like it lost its great character, their emotions and the mood.
'DARK PLACES': Four Stars (Out of Five)A mystery/crime/thriller based on the 2009 novel, of the same name, by Gillian Flynn (the author of 'Gone Girl').
However, somewhere along the way the movie starts to lose track, resulting in an end that should have wowed but instead will leave you asking "is that it?"Full Review:Dark Places is an adaption of the novel by Gillian Flynn, the same person who authored Gone Girl.
Charlize Theron was a great choice for the older Libby, who is trying to find out who murdered her mother and sister when she was 7 years old.
I personally think that he done a great job with this movie and he got the most out of the experienced cast, so it definitely gets the thumbs up from me.Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $3.5millionI recommend this movie to people who are into their drama/mystery/thrillers starring Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Corey Stoll, Christina Hendricks, Chloe Grace Moretz, Drea De Matteo and Anrea Roth.
I was looking for the 'inspired from a true story' label in the credits or the information surrounding Dark Places but what I found instead was that it's based on a book by Gillian Flynn, who also inspired Gone Girl which I hear is a better film which I did not see yet.
The director is the French Gilles Paquet-Brenner whose career alternates French and (North-American) English spoken movies - this is his first film that brings on screen not only a story by a famous crime writer but also the fabulous Charlize Theron, who is also one of the co-producers.The hero of the film is Libby Day (Theron) who has lived all her mature life from the donations and book rights around the horrible crime in which her mother and two sisters were murdered 25 years ago.
This movie is about a crime committed some 30 years ago where the mother and the sisters of Libby Day (Charlize Theron) and her brother, Ben, are murdered.
Libby Day (Charlize Theron) gets confronted about her own tragic family murder 25 years later by entrepreneur Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) from the KT (Killer Team).
I mean her transformation in the film 'monster' really worked, here it kinda feels like a Hollywood version of CHarlize playing a much darker role that doesn't fit her.Despite those minor complaints, "Dark Places" is a solid crime/thriller that keeps the audiences attention and has enough to offer the viewer to give it a hard 6/10..
And once the mystery is over, we don't have any reason to care about these characters, because no effort has been made to make us care about them, or even get to know them as people.Much like in "Gone Girl", and, it seems, in the worldview of Gillian Flynn, the women of "Dark Places" are devious and the men are stupid.