In Darkness review: Turns into a sprawling, fuzzy mess

Dir Anthony Byrne, 101 mins, starring: Natalie Dormer, Emily Ratajkowski, Ed Skrein, Joely Richardson, James Cosmo, Neil Maskell

This initially promising blind-woman-in-peril thriller soon loses its way. The hitch is an incredibly murky and embroiled screenplay (written by star Natalie Dormer and director Anthony Byrne) which involves Bosnian war criminals, assassins and ancient family grudges. A film which starts with a narrow and intense focus turns into a sprawling, fuzzy mess.

Dormer plays Sofia, a brilliant pianist who has been blind since she was five. The most intriguing parts of the story are those showing her going about her daily life. We see her in her dark glasses on the London Underground, on her way home from work where she has been performing with an orchestra in a film studio.

In her own flat, which she knows inside out, the blind woman is meticulous and self-reliant, very different from her upstairs neighbour, Veronique (Emily Ratajkowski), the chaotic and very unhappy daughter of the alleged Balkan war criminal, Zoran Radic.

Director Byrne (who has worked on Peaky Blinders and Ripper Street) fills In Darkness with scenes and characters which evoke memories of Hitchcock’s London-set thrillers from Blackmail to Frenzy. There are bumbling British detectives. When champagne corks pop, everyone thinks they are hearing bullets. All the main protagonists have grim secrets in their pasts.

As extra plot twists and red herrings are thrown into the mix, the film, like its blind heroine, soon begins to stumble. Characters breathlessly utter lines like “he needs that USB back before the Russians get hold of it!”

Sofia’s biggest problem isn’t that she can’t see: it’s the “darkness” and rage simmering away inside her. The brother and sister team of security consultants (Joely Richardson and Ed Skrein) who seem to be trying to kill Sofia one moment and save her life her the next, have their own family secrets.

James Cosmo (one of Dormer’s co-stars on Game Of Thrones) turns up in a baffling cameo as a hard-drinking Scotsman who has become a father figure to Sofia. Amid all the skullduggery and killing, the filmmakers find also time for an unlikely romantic subplot.

In Darkness would surely have worked better with a tighter, clearer storyline. The scenes in which the blind woman is alone in her apartment, unaware there is an intruder behind her, are far creepier than those in which she gets caught up in violence on the London streets or has to confront traumatic memories of the Balkan wars.

In Darkness hits UK cinemas 6 July.