Customer Reviews

After Darkness [VHS]

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In the beginning, I thought this was going to be a real tear-jerker about a kindly older brother trying to save his schizophrenic younger brother from life in hospital. He rents a room for him and even leaves his family for a while to care exclusively for sick Lawrence. But there is something creepy about the dedicated Peter, something you see in Jon Hurts shifting, guilt-ridden expression long before it surfaces in the dialogue. Almost imperceptibly the murderous hatred in the older brothers heart reveals itself, and it comes as no surprise when he ends in the same insanity he tried to save the other from. This is a film with very few characters, mainly John Hurt and Julian Sands, who gives a very subtle performance of the schizophrenic. The third "main character" is the huge, dilapidated, oppressive empty flat in an office building where the two live. A film that will make your skin creep next time somebody offers to help you.

After Darkness is a small, quiet, unremittingly haunting film about a young man, Lawrence, in a mental institution who dreams, or hallucinates, a lost twin. Lawrence is haunted by games with his twin who cannot see what he sees--their mother turn to ice, the sand on the beach sucking his twin down.

His older brother, Peter, is haunted by dreams, too, brought on by the guilt of leaving his younger sibling in an asylum. He feels he must bring him home, to his wife and child. Oh, and his daughter has nightmares, too.

Within the first 5 minutes of the movie, we see two hallucinations, a reverie or dream, and two people dragged from sleep by nightmares. Clearly, we're in the realm of dream horror.

The dreams push the plot along--Lawrence is obsessed with ice and plunges himself into a bath of it; Peter's guilty dreams drive him to bring the Lawrence out of the asylum to a small apartment.

The relationship quickly falls apart, and Peter resorts to beating and manipulating his younger brother into submission during his outbursts. He decides that he must find a way into his world, and, an anthropologist, he has the skills and tools to do so.