Watch Dark Night

Dark Night is a 2016 drama film directed by Tim Sutton. It depicts a disconcerting narrative following six characters as they try to make sense of their lives in the hours leading up to a mass shooting at a movie theater in a small Florida town. The movie takes its title from the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, that happened during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment in director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. However, Dark Night is more of a meditation on the ripples of that event than an effort to dramatize it.

The story is conveyed in a nonlinear structure, as we follow different characters throughout the day leading up to the shooting. The film cuts back and forth between these storylines, creating an overall sense of tension and impending doom.

We meet a handful of very different people: a young man (Robert Jumper) who spends most of his day wandering the city in a daze, listening to music and meeting strangers; a single mom (Anna Rose Hopkins) who is struggling to care for her young son; a social media addict (Rosie Rodriguez) who spends her day taking selfies and posting to Instagram; a middle-aged man (Aaron Purvis) who drives around in his car, muttering to himself; and two teenage boys (Karina Macias and Eddie Cacciola) who spend the day skateboard around and picking up girls.

The script by Sutton is minimal, which leaves plenty of room for directorial flourishes. Sutton’s eye is drawn to long takes and wide angles; his camera is also excellent at capturing the beauty of this small town. There is an interesting contrast that emerges between the bright palm trees and golden sunshine of its streets and the more mundane and slightly rundown interiors that the characters inhabit. The film is studded with striking images: a flock of birds taking off from the roof of a gas station, a lone cyclist pedaling through an industrial wasteland.

As a study of violence and the role it plays in American cultural life, Dark Night is both remarkably precise and elusive. Sutton never evokes Aurora directly, but it's never far from the surface either. Instead, the film creates a portrait of the world that gave rise to the tragedy and the ways that it still haunts us today.

The movie is not about the shooter, and it does not provide any obvious explanations for the massacre. Instead, it focuses on the everyday lives of the characters who will be in the theater that night. We are given brief glimpses of their personalities and families, and we see how they spend their day leading up to the event. But in the end, the specifics of their lives are not what matter. What matters is the overwhelming sense of fragility — that any individual in this movie could be lost at any time, to any cause or to no cause at all.

Dark Night is an unsettling film, and it knows it. The movie handles its subject matter with a lot of maturity and sensitivity. It’s not looking to whip up any particular response in the audience, and it doesn't have a tidy moral or message at its heart. Instead, it's asking its viewers to really consider how we come to terms with the unthinkable. It's an unflinching look at a world where a small-town movie theater can become the scene of a tragic event, and it refuses to oversimplify the questions that arise from this possibility.

Overall, Dark Night is a haunting and thought-provoking film that asks audiences to consider the complex consequences of senseless violence. It is an atmospheric and intense portrait of the seemingly ordinary moments that lead up to a tragedy. While the movie is not explicitly about the Aurora shooting or any other specific act of violence, it is a reflection on the pain and horror that these events produce. The movie lingers long after the credits roll, and it is sure to leave viewers with a lot to think about.

Dark Night is a 2017 drama with a runtime of 1 hour and 35 minutes. It has received moderate reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 4.3 and a MetaScore of 60.