From left: Daniel Gillies and Matthias Luafutu in Coming Home in the Dark Cancel that wilderness escape.
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A family hiking trip on New Zealand’s remote coastline becomes a nightmare of bloodshed and retribution in debuting director James Ashcroft s white-knuckle psycho thriller.
The enormity of nature hits you like a freight train in the early scenes of James Ashcroft s taut and sinewy first feature,
Coming Home in the Dark. The majestic rural landscape of Greater Wellington, on the southernmost tip of New Zealand s north island, changes in an instant from a place of enveloping tranquility to one of terrifying, helpless isolation as a family s encounter with a pair of murderous drifters uncovers past trauma. What starts out as a nerve-rattling portrait of chance violence becomes a dark meditation on the long-term reverberations of childhood abuse in state institutions.
Coming Home in the Dark Review: A Confident Kiwi Horror Debut Mixes Extremity and Ambiguity Coming Home in the Dark Review: A Confident Kiwi Horror Debut Mixes Extremity and Ambiguity
A daytripping family is put violently through the wringer in James Ashcroft s debut, which initially channels Wolf Creek before revealing something else on its mind.
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Running time: Running time: 93 MIN.
Goldfish Creative
An expensive new car slouches on the side of a deserted country road, unoccupied and unattended, while one passenger door hangs open, creaking disconsolately in the afternoon breeze. It’s the kind of opening image that immediately warns you the film to come is up to nothing good, or at least nothing pleasant: “Coming Home in the Dark” never tells us who was behind the wheel of that abandoned car, though it gives us enough indirect detail to paint a pretty vivid, stomach-turning picture of what went down. At first glance, New
Tension and Terror Join Forces for Coming Home in the Dark
Survival is sometimes the hardest lesson to learn.
Light in the Dark Productions
The potential for terror is evident all around us if you take even a moment to look, from extreme situations to our most mundane moments, but it’s the latter which hurt the most. We’ve all been on road trips with loved ones, enjoying the company and the scenery, but all it takes is one misstep for it all to come crashing down.
Coming Home in the Dark captures that misstep, and a few more, as one family sees a good day descend into shocking violence, nerve-shredding terror, and worse.
A one and a half-hour gut-punch,
Coming Home in the Dark is bleak, tense, and often unshakable. It sticks with you; haunts you. Leaves you feeling restless. Anxiety-inducing and frequently unpleasant, it travels down dark roads, and while you can likely guess the destination, getting there is no less unnerving. In
James Ashcroft‘s film, a family trip to the picturesque, and remote, New Zealand coastline turns deadly and spirals out of control into one very long night. You won’t exactly
enjoy this movie, but you might very well be awed by its emotional power.
Right before the chaos truly begins in