Looking Back at 2010s Films: Super Dark Times (2017)

By Tanner Smith

Fun fact: I met this film’s director, Kevin Phillips, once (at the Fantastic Cinema & Craft Beer Festival in Little Rock in the summer of 2017). Nice guy.

“Super Dark Times” is a slow-burn thriller that escalates into bloody violence, sheer terror, and complete loss of innocence…and even during all that escalating, things are already “super dark!”

Don’t believe me? It opens with two cops killing a dying deer that made its way through a window at school, as one of our main characters watches in awe…that’s only a hint of the bloodshed that’s to come!

Things get worse when four boys, alone in an open field, play around with a sword…you probably already know what happens there.

When I watch scenes like that (and a scene from “Boyhood” in which kids play with saw blades), I tense up because I’m afraid something might happen. (Sometimes, I’m right–the film wouldn’t be called “Super Dark Times” if things didn’t get…”super dark,” thanks to scenes like that.) It makes me think back to when I was a kid growing up in the country and thank God that the stupid things my friends and I did back then didn’t get us hurt and/or killed!

I mean, we always felt like we knew what we were doing, and nothing terrible ever happened. But sometimes, I wonder, what if… ah, forget it, we were careful and things were fine. (But even so, I’m never letting my kids play with weapons.)

“Super Dark Times” is a film about a group of kids who think they’re invincible and nothing can go wrong…until EVERYTHING goes wrong. The youngest kid wants to ignore it all and move on with his life. One kid is too busy trying to accept the responsibility of making sure not everything goes to hell that he keeps having to turn down the advances of his own crush! And then, the other kid…

You know what? In my long ramblings this past month, I’ve talked about spoilers and what I think they mean in analysis (with the exception of “The VVitch”), but this time, I’m just going to say check it out and see what you make of it. It’s currently streaming on Netflix–if you have an account (and can stomach the material I already mentioned here), give it a watch!