I WILL FOLLOW YOU INTO THE DARK (2012)

Studio:       Epic Pictures
Director:    Mark Edwin Robinson
Writer:       Mark Edwin Robinson
Producer:  David C. Robinson, Danny Roth, Christine Holder, Mark Holder
Stars:     Mischa Barton, Ryan Eggold, Leah Pipes, Jaz Martin

Review Score: 

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Summary:

After the deaths of her parents challenge her spiritual beliefs, a young woman finds her faith tested again when her boyfriend goes missing in a haunted building. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Sophia Monet tends to her devoutly religious father Peter on his deathbed. Before dying, Peter tells his daughter that he was wrong about his faith and that there is nothing but emptiness in the afterlife. At his funeral, Sophia challenges God to disprove her newfound belief that there is nothing more to life after the end of mortality.

Sophia’s male roommate Sam tries to get her socially active following the mourning of her parents, but Sophia spurns his attempts. On the sidewalk, a young man named Adam Hunt bumps into Sophia. The two begin flirting and take a walk together. Sophia notices a tour group outside of the building where Adam lives. He mentions that his building is reportedly haunted and convinces her to go on the paranormal tour with him as a lark. Sophia and Adam continue dating until she goes two weeks without calling him for no reason other than continuing to mope.

Sophia wakes in the middle of the night with the feeling of hands frighteningly pressing against her chest and choking her. Combined with recent experiences of other strange events, Sophia calls Adam and spends the night at his place for comfort. While there, Sophia meets Adam’s female roommate Astrid Daniels. She also learns from property manager Mr. Carter that the building’s stairs are out of order. Sophia flashes back to before her father’s funeral, when she found a note from Peter’s nurse that implicated the woman in an assisted suicide. Distraught over the loss of his wife six months earlier, Peter Monet killed himself, but made it look natural to spare his daughter.

Sophia cuts herself on glass from a framed photo of her parents that breaks mysteriously. Her relationship with Adam deepens.

One night, Sophia wakes in Adam’s bed to discover that he is missing and blood is in his place. She and Astrid call the police while following the blood trail into the elevator and up to the building’s top floor. Frightened by the eerie atmosphere up there, they return to the apartment. When the police arrive, they do not find blood anywhere. Mr. Carter advises the girls not to go up to the top floor as spirits are trapped there.

Sophia and Astrid get Sam and his girlfriend Penny to help them search the top floor for Adam. After the group experiences several strange occurrences, Penny is hurt when she falls through a floor and is knocked unconscious. Sam rescues Penny and leaves her by the elevator while looking for another way to escape since there are no stairs. The friends separate.

Sophia has a vision of an old man who explains why the tortured souls are trapped between life and death. He tells Sophia that she will have to join Sam if she hopes to find him. Astrid becomes possessed after a ghostly encounter and begins acting strangely. Sophia discovers a box of her missing keepsakes and realizes that the spirits were trying to take her, not Adam.

Sophia convinces Astrid to drown her in a bathtub so that she can search for Adam in the afterlife, but to revive her with CPR before six minutes elapses. Astrid drowns Sophia, but then goes into a trance. As a ghost, Sophia sees Penny’s spirit, as she has also died. Sam finds Astrid with Sophia’s body and begins performing CPR, but he is unable to revive Sophia. However, Sophia finds Adam and joins him in the afterlife.

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Review:

About midway through “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” my finger became restless and began inching towards the Stop button.  Not because of something that was necessarily wrong with the movie per se, but because I was starting to believe that I had been hoodwinked into a melodramatic romance that purported to be a paranormal thriller when it was shaping up to be nearly nothing of the sort.  Not that there is anything wrong with a straightforward pretty people love story or romcom, it was just not what I had primed myself for with that evening’s entertainment.  Writer/director Mark Edwin Robinson makes a bold choice to merge genres in his film, although he risks alienating audiences by segregating the horror from the romance instead of fusing the two in tandem.

After vaulting to celebrity status thanks to her star turn on TV’s “The O.C.,” Mischa Barton took a brief career detour that saw her appearing in TMZ clips almost as much as feature films.  She bounced back with lead roles in a handful of thrillers, several of which give her quite the pedigree when it comes to navigating haunted hallways and cursed architecture.  “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” joins “Walled In” and the “Apartment 1303” remake as featuring yet another building that is not at all happy to have Ms. Barton within its walls.

Holding her hand on this particular paranormal excursion is “90210” regular Ryan Eggold.  Suitably staffed with handsome faces and an attractive supporting cast, “Into the Dark” is ready for a medley of meet cute romance and supernatural terror.

On his deathbed, Sophia’s devoutly religious father tells his daughter that he made a mistake.  There is no Heaven, no angels, and no afterlife.  The only thing waiting on the other side is nothingness.  Crushed by his death, as well as that of her mother six months earlier, Sophia uses the eulogy at her father’s funeral to challenge God to prove that there is more to life than the mortal coil.

Another six months pass and Sophia literally bumps into Adam on the street.  Their awkward first encounter turns to flirting and ends in a tour of Adam’s reportedly haunted apartment building just so that the two can scoff at the idea of ghosts.

So it is that “Into the Dark” establishes itself as a seemingly tame tale about a woman experiencing a crisis of faith while a budding relationship tests her worldview.  “Into the Dark” spends its first half in the guise of a Lifetime movie, delivering the notion that the only poltergeist that can be expected is whatever will put Sophia back on a path towards believing in God and life after death.  Can this actually be considered a horror movie or is this a puff piece for Christian Mingle?

Adam then goes missing, leaving behind a trail of blood that leads to the abandoned top floor of the apartment building.  And what happens up there sends the movie into a dizzying turn of enough paranormal activity that it almost warrants a separate “found footage” investigation with a night vision camera.

From the midpoint, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” is a different movie than what transpired before.  The bloodshed continues, apparitions possess souls, vintage phonographs play eerie records, and flickering flashlights illuminate dark passageways and shadowy shapes.  The chills are nothing out of the ordinary for any average fright film fan, although Robinson follows the rules in establishing the requisite disquiet and ghostly atmosphere.

Something to appreciate is that when Sophia sees the phantom blood trail that mysteriously disappears before the police arrive, Adam’s roommate sees it too.  The movie does not waste too much effort on the clichés of “I’m telling you what I saw!” and “Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”  “Into the Dark” puts an intrepid foursome together that is on the same page when it comes to searching for Adam, without wasting time on Sophia having to convince anyone else about what is happening on the top floor.

The real mystery though, is who is this movie for?  The disparate tones that seesaw back and forth target half of the movie for one audience, and leave the other half for another.  It is hard to picture paranormal enthusiasts caring much for the core relationship, or sentimentalists engaging in scenes of the supernatural.  The strange juxtaposition of storylines never coalesces into a single mood, instead confusing the film’s overall intentions for both entertainment and meaning.  “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” has interesting things to say and interesting things to show with its capable cast.  If only it settled on an even tone, it would be easier to recommend the film to whoever is its intended audience.

Review Score:  60

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