‘Dark Touch’ DVD Review

Stars: Missy Keating, Marcella Plunkett, Padraic Delaney, Charlotte Flyvholm, Stephen Wall, Robert Donnelly, Susie Power, Richard Dormer, Catherine Walker, Simon Boyle, Olga Wehrly, Mark Huberman, Katie Kirby, Clare Barrett, Art Parkinson | Written and Directed by Marina de Van

Dark Touch is the story of an eleven year old girl called Niamh (Missy Keating) whose parents and baby brother are killed when household objects seemingly begin to attack them of their own accord. Suspecting a gang of homicidal vandals, the police ignore Niamh’s declarations of supernatural events occurring at the family home and goes to live with family friends but the mysterious occurrences start to happen again and the nightmarish horrors of Niamh’s past return to claim more victims.

Featuring a French crew and an Irish cast and one wonders if something drastic was lost in translation…

Dark Touch is apparently a film about child abuse but it misjudges its take on this very difficult subject so badly, it’s borderline offensive. It’s also just stupid. If I were a professional actor asked to deliver a number of the lines in the script, I would want to speak to my agent (assuming of course, I hadn’t read the script prior to signing the contract and thrown it out after a cursory skim).

The dialogue is achingly bad at times (“We can look after her – we have a spare room!”) and jumps tonally from line to line and sometimes part way through sentences. It caused the me to laugh repeatedly and loudly at many clankingly bad exchanges, many involving the kindly school counsellor, who is just terrible.

The single redeeming aspect of the film was an impressive shot of a school collapsing, but other than that, it was a morally dubious, amateurish production that really doesn’t need to be troubled by anyone seeing it again. Which doesn’t say much for the rest of the film does it?

Dark Touch is released on DVD on October 13th, courtesy of Metrodome.