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| Movie Name : |
Down a Dark Hall
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| Cinema Type : |
Hollywood
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| Release Date : |
17-Aug-2018( 6 years, 100 days ago)
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| Directed By : |
Rodrigo Cortés |
| Production House : |
Marty Bowen,Wyck Godfrey,Adrián Guerra,Meghan Hibbett |
| Genre : |
Thriller |
| Lead Role : |
AnnaSophia Robb, Taylor Russell, Uma Thurman
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Rating:2.5/5
A gothic boarding school. Five difficult young women with troubled pasts. One vampiric headmistress, played by the peerless Uma Thurman with a knowing dose of humor. In an ideal world, the compelling on-paper features of “Down A Dark Hall,” an adaptation of the classic 1974 Young-Adult thriller by the celebrated author Lois Duncan (of “I Know What You Did Last Summer”), would translate into engrossing chills in an entertaining horror package. Yet “Buried” director Rodrigo Cortés’ mild supernatural mystery often feels like an incomplete genre exercise; one that reluctantly tiptoes around its “Suspiria”-for-teens premise, without fully utilizing the visual possibilities and ripe thematic assets at its disposal. Somehow, neither the plentiful creaky floorboards that the story rests on nor Thurman’s spot-on, French-accented coolness manages to send shivers down the audience’s spine through this allegorical and bitterly timeless tale of female exploitation.
And yet, the aforementioned shortcomings are hardly the fault of YA, a genre that is often (wrongly) dismissed as slight and lowbrow but continues to give young female actors the rare gift of meaty parts. While this is also technically true for “Down A Dark Hall,” its script (co-written by Michael Goldbach and Chris Sparling) limits the film’s talented ensemble of players by neglecting to build them out as full-fledged characters we can slowly get to know and care about. This oversight is even the case for the film’s main protagonist Kit Gordy (AnnaSophia Robb, of “The Way, Way Back”), a challenging young woman with a fiery temper and a long history of academic suspensions.