[Film Review] Blades in the Darkness (2022)

Alex Visani, director of the 2022 slasher-horror Blades in the Darkness, has a history with the type of visceral, gory cinema you could call "body horror". With film titles including Stomach (2019) and Born Dead (2021) under their belt, Visani is familiar with the gore and shock tactics that make horror tick and that draw audiences back.

Their latest indie chiller, with a screenplay co-authored by Alessandro Albertini and Lorenzo Lepoti, moves into more ambitious territory with a historical story that brings fantastical horror elements to the real world and uses monsters to reflect human extremism and cruelty. The film may not smoothly combine all these elements, and the storytelling-which moves between the past and the present- sometimes undermines the film's efforts to create necessary tension. But Blades in the Darkness takes worthy creative risks and, at its best moments, creates a memorable image of evil that you'll take away with you after the closing credits.

Blades in the Darkness is set in present-day Albania with flashbacks to a formative and brutal period in the country's history as it transitioned away from communism in the 1990s. The film's unlikely heroes are a group of ambitious young people Davide, (Endrit Ahmetaj) Giulia, (Ingrid Monacelli) Nua (Ilirda Bejleri) and Adrian (Ermir Jonka). These would-be hustlers arrive in Tirana, Albania's capital, looking to plunge into Albania's growing economy and fund entrepreneurial dreams of opening a high-end restaurant in an abandoned communist-era bunker that broods empty and undisturbed on the edge of Tirana. 

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

Of course, the bunker is not empty. Something watches and waits, shrouded in the darkness of the deep warren of tunnels beneath Tirana's cityscape. There are drawbacks to the film, but it should be said that it's great to see ambitious filmmakers take meaningful stabs at addressing the thorny legacies of war and conflict within a distinct strand of horror cinema. Horror may seem unlikely territory to confront this history, but Visani does an impressively unnerving job of transforming dread into fear and shock. Blades in the Darkness flashbacks to 1990s Albania, where we meet and watch Matia, a shy adolescent living amidst the final days of communism, escape his bullying peers by hiding in an underground bunker. The claustrophobia immediately sets in as the film becomes an odd hybrid of a slasher film and an exploration of the horrors of war and totalitarianism. Deep underground are the remnants of a dissolving communist past that wants to keep Matia in their sealed-off world, celebrating the glory days of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.

The film maintains two parallel worlds of horror – one aboveground and one underground, one in present-day Albania and one in historical Albania – each informing the other with horror and urgency. There are moments when this cross-cutting storyline heightens the escalating sense of other-worldly tension. We watch one of the group members get in too deep with the local mob and the underground criminal world in Tirana, unleashing a series of narrative twists that over the expected power relations in the group. No one is who they seem to be; the previously suspicious characters are more than they might seem. 

Yet as Blades in the Darkness moves into more obvious slasher territory, the film gets into a tangle with its elaborate story involving paranoid communists, gangsters, and the familiar figure of the stalking, slasher killer. Visani's hold on the film's pacing is uneven, and his lively ideas – including Matia's backstory and stunted psychological development – don't always come together as convincingly as they could. By the film's closing moments, Blades in the Darkness has left the dank, claustrophobia of the bunker but still doesn’t quite manage to thread together its themes and explosive plot.

Ultimately, Blades in the Darkness is a  Euro-horror that, while building an evocative premise against the backdrop of civil war in Albania, becomes increasingly choppy with its editing in its final sequences. Still, Visani's ambition is commendable and eye-catching features – including costume design that recalls the special effects of 1980s horror – help smooth out some of these drawbacks. Even without the compelling sense of eerie dread created in the opening sequences, Blades in the Darkness is an intriguing, nightmarish horror film worth a watch for all seasoned horror fans.

RELATED ARTICLES

---