Director: Patrick Ryan
MPAA Rating: NR
Patrick Ryan’s feature debut, Darkness on the Edge of Town, is a gritty Irish tale of revenge, wrought with chaos and violence. The dreary fog-soaked hills of Ireland become the perfect backdrop for this story, which revolves around two best friends avenging the murder of an estranged sister. Though it feels as if no one in this film has a soul, Ryan makes up for it by employing some great visuals and lighting, which, along with and interesting narrative structure, make this film worth a look.
The film begins with a young sharpshooter named Cleo (Emma Eliza Regan) practicing with her rifle before there’s a cut to two other women having a confrontation in a dingy bathroom that leaves one of them dead from multiple stab wounds and a slit throat. We discover that the murdered girl was Cleo’s older sister, Aisling (Olwen Catherine Kelly), and the murderer was Cleo’s best friend, Robin (Emma Willis). Unfortunately, we’re the only ones who know this information, yet Cleo and Robin set out to find and subsequently kill who Cleo believes to be her sister’s murderer.
The fact that – from the beginning – we as an audience know who the killer is makes this film less of a whodunit and more of a “whydunnit,” exploring what could have led to this tragic event and why Robin would do such a horrific thing. As the film progresses, we begin to learn more about Cleo and Robin’s friendship, as well as their familial situations, which one could say is dysfunctional at best. Brian Gleeson plays Virgil, Robin’s brother, and the girls’ No. 1 target.
Like most of the other people in this movie, Virgil acts like a brutish bully, nearly killing his sister early on in the film. In fact, everyone in this town – including Cleo and Robin – appear to be remorseless thugs, unafraid to kill or maim whomever they want for any reason. Aside from Cleo and Robin, the other characters’ motivations behind this senseless brutality are largely unexplained, other than the fact that this small rural town appears to mostly be comprised of criminals.
It seems like Ryan took elements of multiple genres to craft his overall vision of this tragic tale. It’s got the gunplay of a violent Western; the shadowy lighting of a noir; and the brutal, bloody revenge plot of…well, a revenge thriller. Peppered in are several brightly colored outdoor sequences, saturated in color, adding some depth to the cinematography, which is one of the film’s strongest aspects.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is a strong debut from Ryan and makes for an entertaining and unique revenge film that also acts as an exploration of friendship and of what could happen if your BFF was a psychopath.
