The Darkness (2016)

The Darkness works best when it treats the haunting less like a carnival ride and more like a stress test on a family already coming apart at the seams, and that’s where it finds its bite. Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell don’t coast through the material—they play the strain, guilt, and exhaustion with enough conviction that the bumps in the night feel like they’re landing on something human, not just a script cue. Director Greg McLean keeps the vibe lean and uneasy, letting ordinary domestic spaces turn sour with creeping noises, odd smells, and the kind of escalating dread that suggests the house is listening. The scares can feel familiar if you’ve seen a lot of modern supernatural thrillers, but if you want a brisk, grimly watchable haunted-house story anchored by actors who take it seriously, this one earns a look.

The Darkness wants to be a modern haunted-house thriller where a family’s real-world fractures make the supernatural threat worse, and on paper the Grand Canyon hook plus Kevin Bacon should give it some bite. In practice, it plays like a checklist of familiar noises-in-the-night tricks and jumpy incidents that rarely build into genuinely tense or imaginative scares, with choppy pacing that makes the drama and the horror feel like they’re competing instead of feeding each other. The cast tries to sell the emotional mess, but the writing doesn’t dig deep enough to make the family dysfunction compelling, and the mythology feels more like background noise than a driver of dread. If you’re looking for fresh supernatural ideas or sustained, nerve-racking horror, this will likely feel thin; if you’re okay with a mild, familiar possession-adjacent ride and a few creepy moments, you might get just enough to pass the time.