[.ca] In a Dark Place

Leelee Sobieski's performances drags down this atmospheric horror film:
Anna Veigh (Leelee Sobieski) is not cutting it as an art teacher in a city school, so she ends up getting a job as a nanny looking after two children in a remote countryside estate. Flora (Gabrielle Adam) and Miles (Christian Olson) lost their parents in a car accident and are now living with their uncle, who is away on a trip in Europe. Running the estate is Ms. Grose (Tara Fitzgerald), who wears formal wear to Anna's first dinner. Anna likes the kids, but then she starts seeing things and bit by bit she starts to discover what the hell is going on there. If the whole thing smacks of a Victorian era horror story, then you are on the right track, which is more than can be said for this 2006 film from first-time director Donato Rotunno. This movie depends on Sobieski to carry the load and frankly she is not up to it for most of the film, alternating between frowning and blank stares as her character tries to puzzle things out. In her relationships with the children she does have a few moments where she connects, but her interactions with Ms. Grose are pretty bad. Anna might be the only person who does not pick up that Ms. Grose is a lesbian, but her admission of admiration for the housekeeper is quite painful and Anna's open-eyed blank stares during their brief lesbian encounter are much more confusing than revealing about her character. Her best scene is the last one and the ending was rather effective, which surprised me because I was totally prepared to give "In a Dark Place" an even lower rating until the final scene. But the surprisingly successful ending cannot totally reverse the downward spiral of this film. I was also bothered by Sobieski's persistent near nudity, what with a couple of baths and a propensity to let her robe hang open, especially when standing in a window. One such scene would be one thing, but throw in everything we get in this film and suddenly I want to complain about the novel notion of gratuitous near nudity. Despite the brief "love" scene, Anna is neither a sexual nor a sensuous character, and for good reason given what we see and learn about her in the film, so every time the film ventures in that direction you have to wonder why. Maybe the idea is for us to stop thinking of the 24-year-old Sobieski as a child actress (or a young Helen Hunt), but her performance in this film would lead me to conclude that she is cannot carry a movie by herself as an actress. "In a Dark Place" starts off by having the names of the two main actresses before the film's title and then dispenses with the rest of the credits because if they had told you up top what literary work was being adapted here that would give pretty much the whole game away. Instead, the credit comes up at the end and you go, "Duh, of course" (and if you decide to see this movie then the least I can do is to preserve that moment for your enjoyment, such as it might be). In the "making of" featurette the director talks about how he tried to sell the film as a new idea rather than as an adaptation, which might speak to the ignorance of Hollywood producers when it comes to knowing literature (not that making the same movie over and over again has never bothered tinsel town). Cinematographer Jean-Francois Hensgen gives the film a nice look and the original music by first-time composer Adam Pendse helps, but Rotunno could have overcome some of the weakness of Sobieski's performance by picking up the pacing in the long set-up of the film before things pick up at the end.