They say, that before you die, your life flashes you by. The decisions you made that led you to this point, the people who meant something to you, and the regrets that you wish you could redo, all align with a glimmering, faint light that carries you over to the other side. The bridge between death, the dying state, and carrying you to the other side is the kind of limbo that has not been explored all that much on celluloid. I mean, if it were me, I’d define it as a place full of existential dilemmas, predicaments, and epiphanies, and to some extent, writer/director S.J. Creazzo’s “Dark Night of the Soul” agrees with that sentiment.
The story is set in the middle of a COVID-like pandemic that has wiped out a large part of the population. A scientist named Alex (Kristanna Loken) assigned to find a vaccine for the virus is one of the many people who are naturally immune to the virus. When we first meet her, she is driving frantically to some place, searching through her research; possibly burdened by the fact that she has been unable to find a cure. In the paranoia of the moment, her car diverges off-road and is tossed around into the woods leading her leg to get stuck under the car’s steering wheel, bleeding profusely.
The accident takes place in the middle of nowhere, although we do see a couple – possibly living nearby discussing among themselves if they should go out with the pandemic still on. Isolated, and bleeding out of her leg, Alex starts to fade away from her present, hallucinating about having conversations with her father and her sister. These moments do not jump in time because while having these conversations, Alex is aware that she is stuck in her car. So, instead, these conversations formulate together to give us, and possibly Alex a catharsis of sorts.
Conversations with her father played by Martin Kove serve as a key point of view for us to know Alex better. She had always been a bright kid, who was pushed by her father to do better. However, the unresolved issues she had with the treatment she was met with by her father peters out as she sits with him, constantly disagreeing or refusing to talk about her husband. Her talks with her sister Lori (Courtney Warner) offer us a leeway into Alex’s arrogance – a personality trait established only by allowing us to see how she is with her sister who is not an overachiever like her.
Some other elements of Alex’s personality are carefully drawn in or occasionally shoe-horned into the premise. The single location set “Dark Night of the Soul” is about Alex’s guilt of not being able to save people along with the trauma of losing those close to her. The actualization that director S.J. Creazzo offers for Alex is one that she needs to understand and let go of. The variable vs. constant philosophy is an interesting core point – rendering this pulpy B-movie premise the kind of fun weight it requires.
However, the low-budget restrictions also make it feel overstretched and bloated. At one point, Alex hallucinates a dog named God and an Amazonian superhero who supposedly represents her dead daughter’s soul. But none of them serve any other purpose in the narrative other than making its themes feel more and more redundant as the movie clocks to a finishing point.
The final act is so predictably juvenile and lazily conceived, that you wish this was a short film, tightly packed with interesting ideas, rather than whatever this final product eventually becomes. There are some interesting visual motifs used here and there but mostly the film feels like a Lifetime movie with lofty ambitions.
