Moody ‘Dark Night’ looks down at listless suburbanites

Published 1:30 am Friday, February 24, 2017

The opening moments of “Dark Night” tell us that something terrible has happened; the rest of the film flashes back to the day leading up to it. No surprise that an ominous mood hangs over everything.

The title, and other scraps of evidence, suggest that the day will culminate in a mass shooting much like the one that erupted in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater during a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in July 2012.

The film, written and directed by Tim Sutton, is set in Sarasota, Florida. It is clear from the way Sutton films this area that he means it to stand in for Anywhere, USA, or more precisely Any Suburb, USA.

It’s a striking landscape, a real land of blahs: giant flat empty spaces and isolated people lost in it all.

Sutton focuses on various citizens here, as they go about their day. There’s something unpleasant — maybe more so than the filmmaker intended — about how we’re not sure which of the men might turn out to be the eventual mass murderer.

All of the people lead empty lives, the young men gliding around on their skateboards, the young women incessantly taking selfies during their workouts. There’s something sour about the way the movie views its subjects, as though the killer isn’t the only person we should look down on.

“Dark Night” doesn’t attempt to beguile as storytelling. The dialogue colors in atmosphere rather than advances the narrative.

This is a mood piece, closer to a musical arrangement than a story. As such, it definitely has a unified look and feel, aided by Helene Louvart’s glowering cinematography.

Into that look, Sutton inserts a canny sequence involving Google Maps, as though to show how this world is reduced to a lifeless grid. There’s something genuinely spooky about that.

“Dark Night” begs comparison to Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” which also looked at the listless prelude to a mass shooting. That film was despairing, too, but it glimpsed the humanity in all its characters. I’m not sure the same can be said about “Dark Night.”

“Dark Night” (2 stars)

An impressionistic look at the hours leading up to a mass shooting, as director Tim Sutton uses the bland, empty spaces of Sarasota, Florida, to create an ominous mood. It’s certainly unified as a tone poem, but the movie tends to look down at its listless people.

Rating: Not rated; probably R for nudity, subject matter

Showing: Grand Illusion