Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023) is a horror movie directed by Teresa Sutherland. It deals with a park Ranger who patrols forests in order to find out what happened in her past. Below is my Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023) movie review
Looking at the trailer you might think this movie is eerie and dark. This could not be further from the truth. In reality this movie has a few creepy scenes and tons of walking. It has a decent soundtrack that makes it sound like the forest is coming alive. Besides that, there’s not much to this movie.
The main character is really boring. Even when asked about her past she dodges it and we don’t get to hear anything about it. We know she is haunted by a little girl and everything leads back to that. I mean EVERYTHING. Every scene leads in some way to her reminiscing about it. She obviously has some guilt here but it gets overly repetitive.
Also she uses her radio to communicate. However, very early on we get a ton of scenes where it malfunctions and the signal spews out something creepy. This happens multiple times and it also gets repetitive. Pretty soon she starts to lose it and ends up imagining things.
This is how the majority of the movie is spent. Rinse and repeat. Keep in mind that this movie is very much about guilt, trauma and many disappearances that happen in national parks that don’t get reported. In fact, in the movie the main character is reading a book that has “411” on it, which is about a large collection of disappearances across US national parks.
If you expect action there is none of it here. If you expect horror there are few creepy scenes and few jump scares. The movie is mainly about a woman trying to find out what happened to her sister and guilt she carries with her regarding his disappearance. She feels guilty and lost so she experiences a lot of weird visions of her family.
There are some scenes of violence and blood but they are dispersed throughout the movie. Mainly there for shock value. Also, if you have a boring main character that does not interact with anybody special, you have a boring movie. Besides that, the main character is not warm or welcoming. In fact, at the beginning she is stand-offish.
I don’t have much to say about this movie. The cinematography is pretty good as a lot of sweeping scenes of landscapes are nice. The characters are boring and the delivery by most of them are bad. It is not a bad movie, just very boring. You can say it is more of a drama movie rather than horror that it is marketed as. Majority of the movie is spent walking, checking into Ranger houses, and showing endless drone shots of trees. As somebody pointed out, for every 1 min of action, there is over 25 min of boring walking that happens in the movie.
It seems very obvious that the filmmakers did not know which direction to take the movie in. They kept making up some creepy stuff, but none of it is new. There is one scene of a melting head in the trailer but in the movie it is shown and we have no idea what it means. Again, the movie is not bad, just very boring.
Thanks for reading my Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023) movie review
