Steven, a small group of IA students, and I all went to see an Austrian film called The Dark at the Gateway theater on the 28th of November to fulfill my non IA requirement. While the movie was an Austrian film, it was in English. It was based on a girl who was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and then brutalized so she wouldn’t tell. The boyfriend buried her alive in a shallow grave. However, she did not stay dead. For some reason in which the movie did not touch on, the girl survived as an undead being. From there, she returns home and kills her mother in vengeance for being a drunkard and bring the boyfriend back into their lives. As time goes on, the house falls into a dilapidated state and the girl sets traps to preserve her solitude in the forest. When an older man intrudes her forest, she hunts him down and kills him, and is later shown eating his entrails. What she did not know was that there was a blind boy that was reliant on the older man.
On a whim, the girl decides not to kill the boy and instead assists him by providing new clothes. An unlikely alliance is then formed between the two as they assist each other by killing various people that threaten them along the way to find a working phone for the boy to use. After her home becomes the murder scene of a police officer, they abandon it and find a lone house in a field. They break in and are then confronted by an elderly woman with a gun. The boy kills her to protect the girl and they then eat the lady’s soup and sleep in her bed. While the boy is sleeping, the girl drags the body to a nearby shed and tries to eat from it. However, she faces major conflict and can’t seem to do it. During this time, the boy is taken from the home and put into the elder lady’s family’s truck. The girl runs after them and causes the truck to crash. The boy sustains critical wounds and struggles to hold on to life. When the ambulance arrives, she leaves him and retreats back to her home. She takes some belongings and drawing materials, leaves the ax, and heads out to the forest. The last scene of the movie is the girl walking alongside the road and eventually getting into a passing car and driving away; the girl is completely human again.
While the movie does not go into anything really international besides it being made in another country. It does discuss, however, deep trauma that occurs with abuse. For instance, the girl’s undead condition could be a physical representation of her loss of humanity. Waking up undead after years of neglect from her mother, and her rape and brutalization caused by her mother’s boyfriend. Traumatized, it would make sense for the girl to return home. However, seeing her mother, the girl was obviously overwhelmed by rage and she ends up killing her mother. Her decision to take care of the blind boy actually saves her. This can later be backed up as she becomes more human throughout the movie as the boy teaches her how to trust again and have compassion towards others. The boy also has had his fair share of emotional and physical abuse by the older man shown at the beginning of the film. The boy has horrific burn scars over his eyes, causing him to be blind. It is later revealed in the movie that the older man caused them in a fit of rage. The boy’s blindness also forced him to rely on the older man for everything. While both abuse stories were different, the boy and girl both learned how to heal by relying on each other, especially in times of crisis. The boy eventually ends up back with his loving mother and the girl becomes human again. What she does with her newly found humanity, we will never know.