By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Bosmo Kosmerly’s Dark Frequencies is a movie that I am in two minds about. On the one hand, it’s a triumph of indie perseverance and resourcefulness : shot on location in Sudbury, Ontario on a crowd funded $6,000 with Kosmerly handling writing, shooting, editing, and music duties. On the other hand however, the narrative itself didn’t particularly grip me.
Dark Frequencies follows DJ ( ER Simbagoye) a mentally ill electronic music producer. DJ accidentally stumbles upon the master frequency, a sound wave so potent that it destroys both the listener’s body and mind. As DJ continues to fall under the frequency’s spell, she tries to stop it from corrupting the people around her.
For $6,000 Kosmerly has assembled a decent homegrown soundtrack, some impressive cinematography (especially during the scenes involving the master frequency itself ), and pulled off some pretty deft editing. Shooting on location in Ontario helps to give the visuals a local touch, and roots the story in a North American suburban setting the same way a lot of horror films from the 1970s-80s did.
Where the movie really falls apart however, is in the script, to put it bluntly, Kosmerly’s characters and narrative aren’t particularly interesting. DJ as a protagonist has no discernible flaws or hook for you to be interested in her at all, and the rest of the supporting cast are all interchangeable cliches.
What doesn’t help is that this movie suffers from some of the worst cases of millennial writing I have seen since that Borderlands adaptation that came out a few years ago that made Uwe Boll look like some kind of misunderstood filmmaking visionary. All the sins of millennial writing are on full display with this movie, from the therapy speak clunkily inserted into every day conversations that comes as across about as naturally as a Jeremy Kyle apology, skin crawlingly irritating quippy dialogue, and characters who swear like eight year olds who’ve just learnt how to do so and think it’s hilarious.
When a great dialogue writer uses swearing in a sentence, for example Richard Price, David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard or David Milch, it’s to bring rhythm and meter to a sentence, often at the end of an insightful piece of dialogue which conveys the characters themselves or a situation they might be in. Whereas Kosmerly’s swearing has the opposite effect in that it’s just tacked on because it can be.
Overall while the effort Kosmerly has put into this film is admirable given the lack of resources, the script itself is far too poor for me to recommend Dark Frequencies. This is a horror film which suffers from a dire lack of atmosphere or tension, and despite a somewhat interesting first ten minutes by the thirty five or forty minute mark I was praying for it to be over.
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