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Mar 28, 2016 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

Darling has been hired to apartment-sit at a gorgeous multi-floor townhouse on Central Park West. The only catch is that it’s rumored to be haunted and the last caretaker mysteriously disappeared. Her week goes about as well as you’d expect.

Although it cribs the premise of The Shining and the location of Rosemary’s Baby, Darling is most indebted to Roman Polanski’s 1965 classic Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve slowly loses her mind while apartment-sitting for her sister in London. Like Polanski’s film, Darling features stark black-and-white photography, a sixties setting recreated on a budget (the hair, clothes and indoor smoking are there, the cars and the acting style are not) and a beautiful young waif descending into madness. Looking much like an Edward Gorey drawing come to life, Lauren Ashley Carter gives her all as the title character but her doll-like eyes and admirable hysterics cannot overcome the fact that the film is thematically and emotionally weightless. Had director Mickey Keating cut the film from its somehow plodding runtime of seventy-six minutes to a tight fifteen, he’d have something resembling the best student film ever made, which would go a long way toward excusing the fact that it’s purely a stylistic exercise.

Repulsion gives the audience a protagonist who possesses a life outside the walls of the apartment and images that sear themselves into their minds. Darling feels like she sprung into existence on the steps of the townhouse and the films idea of visual boundary pushing mostly involves editing that wouldn’t be out of place in a 90’s industrial rock video, even going so far as to begin the film with a warning that the film contains “flashing lights and hallucinatory images.” It may seem unfair to keep comparing a low-budget indie to one of the all time classics of psychological horror, but Darling invites the comparison with every aspect of its existence, much to its detriment.

Author rating: 3/10