CFF screening - short review - DARK TOUCH by Marina de Van

This is the story of an eleven-year-old girl, the sole survivor of a massacre in which her whole family was killed.

The film exploits the horror film genre to depict brutal themes of emotional and physical child abuse either in a domestic setting or at the hands of society. This mixture of serious social and personal issues with genre film and explicit graphic violence is something that Marina de Van has explored in the past but was never able to make fully work – at least not in feature length. Sadly, Dark Touch is no exception.

The metaphor is much too obvious and makes the pace of the film seem overtly slow. In the end, she even resorts to an endless series of clichés that bizarrely recall at once The Village of the Damned remake by John Carpenter, Firestarter by Mark L. Lester and a long childline advert.

The result is disastrously laughable, which is a shame – particularly considering the potential of the story and de Van’s own evident talent that once again does not shine through.