Dark Country
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Dark Country |
| Original title | Dark Country |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2009 |
| length | 88 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Thomas Jane |
| script | Tab Murphy |
| production | Thomas Jane, Lauren German , Ashok Amritraj |
| music | Eric Lewis |
| camera | John Lafferty |
| cut |
John Lafferty Robert Lambert |
| occupation | |
| |
Dark Country is a psychological thriller from 2009 by and with Thomas Jane , who also made his directorial debut with it . Lauren German and Ron Perlman can also be seen in other roles .
action
Gina and Dick may not have been a couple for very long, but that didn't stop them from getting married in Las Vegas . You get a used car and want to go on your honeymoon with it . Before leaving, Dick is warned by a stranger at a diner that newlyweds would often disappear in the desert; he should take good care of Gina. At first, Dick ignores the stranger's statement.
The two have to cross the desert on their way to their honeymoon. You don't have any maps with you and promptly lose your bearings. Gina distracts her husband from driving while driving through erotic behavior. He turns off the low beam and the two race through the night. When Dick switched the light back on, a seriously injured man suddenly stood on the road. Dick can dodge and stop with great difficulty. Obviously the stranger was in a car accident. They put him on the back seat of their car to be taken to a hospital.
After a while the man wakes up with a helpless scream. He is unusually agile, demands a cigarette and advises Gina to break up with her husband. All of a sudden he chokes Dick and the two men fight during the journey. Gina can just bring the car to a stop. The two men continue fighting outside the vehicle until Dick can grab a stone lying next to him and hit the attacker's head with it several times. Dick and Gina panic and don't know what to do. Gina accuses him of having committed murder , but Dick insists that he acted in self-defense . Eventually the two decide to bury the body in the wild. Dick imperceptibly loses his watch, on the back of which his name is engraved .
The two drive on and finally arrive at a rest area. Dick notices that his watch is missing and wants to return to the grave. It comes to an argument with Gina, but the two make up again. However, Gina refuses to return to the job. Dick gives her a revolver that he found in her handbag earlier and drives off.
When he arrived at the place, he heard two shots in the distance. When he also sees that the supposedly dead person is gone, he drives back to the rest area. But Gina has disappeared. He follows a trail into the desert and discovers a fresh grave. When he shovels the sand aside, a woman's hand, which is strange to him, comes to light. He runs back to the rest area and hopes to be able to wake a sleeping traveler by the cars parked there. However, the cars are all abandoned and have obviously been there for many years.
He gets back in the car and drives down the street at full throttle. Suddenly a police vehicle comes towards him. A police officer stops him and Dick tells him that his wife has disappeared and that he found a woman's body at a rest stop. The policeman asks him to take a seat in the back of his vehicle and they both drive to the rest area. Several police vehicles are already there when they arrive; other police officers dig up a body, including Gina's and his watch. He realizes that he will be charged with murder, escapes from the police vehicle and speeds away from the rest area in one of the vehicles. A wild chase begins. After hanging out the police, he drives down a dark country road again. He remembers the admonishing words of the stranger when an enormous number of bugs fly against the windshield of the car. He loses control and his vehicle overturns. Dick is thrown out of the car and lies seriously injured on the road.
After he has picked himself up, a vehicle drives towards him and can barely swerve to brake. The viewer sees him waking up in his car on the back seat. Dick and Gina sit in the front and talk about taking the injured man to the hospital. The viewer now recognizes that the injured man was also Dick and saw the murderer in the real Dick, who was sitting next to Gina in the front. That's why he tried to kill him.
criticism
There was mixed criticism after its release.
The lexicon of international films judged that the film was "trying to create an atmosphere [...]". The director succeeds in “condensing the conventional story into an effective thriller”.
Adaptation
The story of the film is based on a comic book scenario by Tab Murphy . After the completion of the film, Thomas Jane asked the comic artist Thomas Ott whether he could turn the story into a finished comic. The comic was published in 2013 based on Tab Murphy's story, without Ott having seen the film, and so, according to Ott, tells his own variant of the same story.
Web links
- Dark Country in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Footnotes
- ↑ Dark Country in the Lexicon of International Films
- ↑ Thomas Ott, Tab Murphy, Thomas Jane: Dark Country . Edition Moderne, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-03731-114-1 .