Normally I wouldn't take up space writing about such an inept haunted-house movie, but A Lovely Side to Darkness (a lovely side to what-now?) is almost instructional in its badness. If the movie we're shown in a film school class, it would make for a good discussion, and the students would go home satisfied in the knowledge that they had actually learned something at school that day.
"A teenager experiences strange things going on in his house. He later finds out that whatever is responsible for all of this is trying to communicate with him." You may have noticed that I've copied the video description word-for-word. I did that because it has more plot information in it than I was able to glean from watching the film.
The 15-minute movie has essentially two set pieces: the teen's bedroom, and a series of bizarrely awkward father-son conversations around the dinner table. The dialogue is nonsensical; characters get suddenly ANGRY for no apparent reason. The confrontations between the boy and his dad are especially bewildering. Why are they so mad at each other? Things needn't be so murky. In Michael Cuesta's L.I.E., we understand the teen and his dad completely, and their volatile relationship is laid out in stark terms. In A Lovely Side to Darkness, we understand nada.
Where the film becomes almost educational is in its jump-and-scream moments. Writer-director Juan Alcazar appears to be going for the kind of supernatural horror we've seen in such Japanese imports as The Grudge and The Ring. When you study those movies, what you notice is how solid the editing is. Without the right number of set-ups and reaction shots, the action causes not fright but confusion. There's a classic moment in A Lovely Side to Darkness when the hero thinks he sees a ghost, flips on a light, and looks again. But the logical next shot - the one showing us what he's looking at - isn't there. Can he see the ghost or not? We'll never know, because the filmmaker hasn't given us the information we need to react.
I want to applaud Alcazar for the film's complicated sound design and scary makeup effects. Despite his film's failings, he does show promise, and who's to say he doesn't have a horror masterpiece in him on the level of Let the Right One In?
