- March 9, 2025
It all works, in a creepy, exciting and relevant way. And then the second half happens.
BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIAT EDITOR
“Dark Skies” starts off strong.
Instead of opening with scenes showing just how perfect life is for its main characters, we watch the Barrets (played by Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton) struggle to make ends meet.
Danny Barret’s out of work and chokes in job interviews. Past-due bill notices are piling up. And Lacey Barrett is too good a person to nudge clients into bad real estate deals, even though she desperately needs the money.
Like most of the country, the Barrets are a middle-class family who can’t seem to catch a break. They’re wondering what else could go wrong. And by striking this Great Recession Paranoia chord early and often, Writer-Director Scott Stewart opens us up to idea that that next thing just might be supernatural.
Even once scary things start happening, though, the first act of “Dark Skies” is about the unknown. The Barrets’ home repeatedly gets broken into without any signs of forced entry; their youngest son claims he’s getting nightly visits from “The Sandman;” hundreds of birds crash into their windows and siding. Stewart builds tension through mystery, suspense and a feeling of helplessness.
Against her better judgment, Lacey even starts suspecting aliens are behind their torment, which opens a great little Logic-vs.-Mystery debate.
It isn’t groundbreaking, but it all works, in n creepy, exciting and relevant way.
And then the second half happens.
It seems that every movie about the supernatural needs a resident “expert,” a guy the protagonists find in some dusty library who explains away all of the story’s ambiguity. “Dark Skies” is no different. And even though Stewart references his own cliché (“Of course he would have cats,” a skeptical Danny rolls his eyes to Lacey, in the expert’s feline-infested apartment), the second the movie becomes about aliens, and not about the Barrets, all the air gets sucked right out of it.
We stop dead in our tracks for 15 minutes or more of exposition. Then an action scene comes that ignores all of the rules established earlier in the story.
“Dark Skies” is a quiet chiller, with a few good jumps but mostly subtlety and shadow. Maybe Stewart felt he needed some bright lights and gunfire toward the end to give viewers their money’s worth. But most of the time, it seems the unknown is a lot more powerful when its left unknown.
CRITICAL MASS
“Dark Skies” (PG-13, 1 hr 35 minutes)
Director: Scott Stewart
Released: Feb. 22
**.5 (of five)
“Dark Skies” does a lot of things right before it falls apart. It’s not a bad time at the movies, but the Oscars are on tomorrow. Use tonight to catch up on a Best Picture nominee, instead.
Rotten Tomatoes 39% fresh (of 31 critics)
IMDB 6.3 (out of 568 fans)
Michael O’Sullivan (Washington Post) says: Rotten
Andy Webster (N.Y. Times) says: Fresh
