Super Dark Times
(2017 Tribeca Film Festival Review)
Photo: Tribeca Film Festival
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. The bumper sticker implies that if we didn’t have access to guns, our cavemen brains and violent natures would still compel us to murder each other with whatever we could get our hands on. A gun is just a tool—it’s innate in our delinquent species to wipe each other out.
Super Dark Times certainly agrees with that premise, at least regarding men. It’s a coming-of-age nightmare that starts with an accidental death and keeps mounting larger and larger horrors upon its teenage friends. These friends—Zach (Owen Campbell, oscillating between milquetoast and overeager), Josh (Charlie Tahan, creepy as hell), Daryl (Max Talisman, damned with a South Park fat kid caricature) and Charlie (Sawyer Barth, precociously competent)—are played with all the nascent vulgarity one should expect of early high school: eager to both impress and overcompensate in their search for dictional maturity. “Skittles are fucking delicious,” Charlie says, carbon-dating the quartet between children and adults.
Their friendship develops easily and naturally, though their dynamic’s accuracy is—like teen boys themselves—tiring to the point of grating. There’s no pastiche here like Superbad or any other R-rated high school comedy of its ilk, there is only the unflinchingly douchey mise-en-scene, of which Super Dark Times is a master, its landscape speckled with juvenile graffiti and parking lot shenanigans. Horniness and profanity are the language in which its poetry is written, the only language its characters know. That’s why, when things go terribly wrong in the forest, when a samurai sword is involved in places it shouldn’t be, we understand that the survivors have no idea how to cope. They can barely go three words without an f-bomb.
Josh and Zach are at odds even before tragedy sets them off into their own horrible spirals, even if they keep their resentment bottled. They both pine for Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino, wonderful as a charming goofball who grows more serious and distant over time) but her affection lies with Zach, tossing more into the mounting hormonal tempest within these stressed teens. And of course: a samurai sword. Nothing screams “stupid suburban excess” or “Frank Miller comic” or “I’m white and troubled and should probably write in a journal about it” like a kid owning a samurai sword. (Or shurikens or nunchucks.) It’s the perfect weapon for a film simultaneously obsessed with and distracted from burgeoning toxic masculinity.