Have you seen “Courageous?” What about “Facing the Giants” or “Flywheel?” Perhaps you have seen “I Can Only Imagine,” “Overcomer,” “Wonder,” “Sound of Hope,” or any other movie in this vein? If so, then good news, dear viewer, you can save money on a ticket to the movies because you have already seen “Brave the Dark.”
“Brave the Dark” is a film, based on true events, about how a young man was on the wrong track in life, but with the help of his teacher he turned his life around and grew as a person. If this sounds familiar, it is because there are a million other movies like it, and this movie has nothing to differentiate it from those other movies.
“Brave the Dark” is by no means bad, it just does not have anything special to make it stand out. The performances are fine, the cinematography is fine, the script is fine, everything is just fine, no better, no worse.
The movie does a few things well. The sets fit the time period very well and the costuming and makeup/hairstyling are equally good. This aspect of the film makes scenes that are otherwise unimpressive still immersive. The movie also does a good job of “show do not tell,” which is a breath of fresh air given how many movies of this type fall prey to holding the audience’s hand the whole time.
However, there are also some irritating problems with the movie. As already said, this movie is a cookie-cutter, feel-good story where a wayward youth finds his way in the world with the help of his mentor. The movie is so formulaic that select scenes do not flow well, and the pacing is off.
For example, the big, emotional speech the main character gives about his troubled past in the third act does not seem like it happened naturally in the context of the story, it seemed instead like the filmmakers knew it was time for the big emotional moment to happen, so it did. The movie’s story progresses like the writers had a plot diagram and wrote the story to fit into it, instead of letting the events flow.
Problems with the plot structure also lead into another problem in which some conflicts, most notably during the Christmas portion of the movie, seem forced. Fortunately, the resolutions seem natural, and in fact the scenes of these conflicts being resolved are the best parts of the movie.
The commitment to telling the real story of Stan Deen and Nathan Williams is both the movie’s greatest strength and weakness. The movie accurately portrays the ebb and flow of a person changing for the better, however, since the movie is so committed to fitting the generic film structure of character growth, the protagonist’s regressions feel out of place and rushed.
A final pair of problems with the movie are its title and poster. “Brave the Dark” is a cool title, which surely the filmmakers knew, but the problem is that it conveys nothing about the movie and has no real connection to the substance of the film.
Furthermore, the poster has the same problem of looking cool but being disconnected from the movie it is supposed to inform the viewer about. The title and poster make the movie seem like a horror movie, or an adaptation of a dystopian young adult novel.
Despite many of the important things about the movie to note being negative, the movie itself is not bad. The movie is of perfectly middling quality. The movie may not be worth paying to see on its own merit, but there are worse ways to spend a couple hours than supporting Angel Studios.
