The Darkest Universe

Dir: Will Sharpe, Tom Kingsley

2016

**

I was a big fan of 2011’s Black Pond and I loved the sitcom Flowers. Both were made by Cambridge Footlights friends Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, a pair of talented writers with a very unique take on eerie drama with an equally unique sense of humour. 2016’s The Darkest Universe, made over three years between 2013 and 2015, certainly has their signature all over it but I found it quite hard to get into. It’s a slow burner for sure but I’m not sure it ever really heats up to its full potential. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, not something that ever bothers me but not something I think they do particularly well here. Zac (Will Sharpe) is a lonely, highly strung city trader on the edge of a psychological breakdown. He has lost everything - his job, his girlfriend Eva (Sophia Di Martino who also stars in Flowers) and, most devastatingly, his weird and wayward younger sister Alice (Tiani Ghosh), the only family he had left. Alice is now a missing person, having disappeared on a narrow boat trip along with her kindred drifter and boyfriend Toby (Joe Thomas). Zac becomes increasingly frustrated with the futile attempts of the police to find them and, eventually, decides to take matters into his own inexpert hands by starting a terribly executed video blog and scouring the dark canals of the UK in a desperate, perhaps even deluded search for clues. Struggling for information and fast losing hope, Zac reflects on his past and the difficult relationship he had with Alice. Wracked with guilt and regret, his sanity starts to unravel as he fights with memories of her in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. As he remembers her sweetly burgeoning relationship with the mysterious Toby, however, he begins to wonder if there may in fact be a grander, wilder, much stranger explanation for their disappearance. It’s something of an anti-climax, although I did enjoy the ambiguity. There are some tender moments within the film and some of the later scenes where Zac is reflecting on forgotten memories are almost profound but nothing quite fits together. It was filmed over three years and it really looks like it. Dare I say it, but it feels like a project that was either stuck or left on the back burner for a while that was resurrected, not so much out of passion, but so as not to have wasted time and money on it. If everything about the film is how it was intended, then I’m afraid Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley need to step outside of their own echo chamber. One could argue that it just wasn’t to my tastes, and it would be a correct argument, but as nice as much of the film looks, there are so many filler scenes that if you took them all away this would be a short film and maybe something it should have been from the very beginning. It’s uncomfortably self-indulgent. I don’t know about Black Pond but Flowers certainly has a fan following, but I’m not sure Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley have enough of a following for The Darkest Universe to ‘be’ for anyone other than themselves. I don’t really understand any of the filming techniques used, why they needed so many redundant characters or quite what their editing plan was. The film has a beginning and an ending but the all important middle is completely missing. I’m not sure there was a script a such and I found the ad-libbed performances awfully trite. None of the quirks worked and if I’m being honest it all looked rather amateurish, to the point where you have to wonder whether the BAFTAs Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley were awarded were a spot of luck. I’m starting to wonder who they were up against that year. The biggest problem I had with the film was that I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about the disappeared couple, I didn’t care whether they were found or for any of the people they left behind. This Greek tragedy is just a tragedy. A rather uninteresting and tiresome tragedy, although not really a tragedy because in order for something to be considered a tragedy, someone has to first care about it. Maybe I’m being particularly harsh but I do feel that this was a project that lost its way and lacked a certain level of passion. It could and should have been an excellent short film but as it stands it’s an overlong and rather dull and pointless feature. Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley have proven they are capable of much more.