For God's sake. Faith Farmiga grew up in a Catholic family, later converted to Christianity, and now is not tied to any religion, but nevertheless her life experience suggests that the religious community, although it has some negative features, is a positive phenomenon. Therefore, religious people who are waiting with horror for a trick in every film on a topic where they invariably appear as fanatics or even murderers can calm down about the directorial debut of the Faith, which not only does not criticize religion, but, although it is intended for a wide audience, will be fully understood only by those who know the faith in God.
The director believes that “This Dark World” tells about the temptations that everyone struggles with, regardless of religion or its absence, but in fact the prism with which the topic is revealed will not be close and clear to a person far from religious tinsel, and he will constantly ask various questions, such as why it is necessary to discuss temptation and hell in a friendly conversation, and then also listen to the man whose wife became “vegetable” after the operation, thanking the Almighty. Therefore, the viewer, in which there is no God, will not be able to feel the main idea of the film, that is, the story of the inner struggle, and not only because it is “the definition of what God means to us, not whether he exists or not.” Corrine's resistance is very sluggish, told in half-hints, in most of which it is impossible to know whether she approves of what is happening or not, if you yourself have never felt it.
Despite the fact that when viewing the picture, an anti-religious person is unlikely to experience any difficulties regarding the “where the legs grow from”, the film lacks the force that captures the viewer, which happens in a film about a maniac, which is watched by a person who has never killed. That is, the director is not very successful in making you worry about a hero who is in a period of life in which you have never been and are unlikely to be, while the main goal of the director is to attract even a major skeptic or a completely indifferent viewer. In This Dark World, a purely emotional element associated with the collapse of relationships that began at a young age is poorly developed, which could become a guiding straw for the denying viewer to feel the picture. In Farmiga, this straw is the so-called “aspiration for a healthy soul”, but is this enough?
In the films of Vera's colleagues in independent cinema "Red State" and "Marta, Marcy, May, Marlene", released in the same year, and denying ideals and dogmas, a much hotter and more attractive energy boils. Farmiga, based on the memoirs of Carolyn Briggs, clearly explains why her heroine comes to God and for what reasons she adheres to him, but at the same time the struggle in her soul is strangely quenched, decorated extremely decently, as if with fear of inadvertently offending religious communities. If you begin to lay out what is happening in the film after watching, then slowly begins to appear the chronicle of reflections of the heroine, but nevertheless, even then her throwing will be close and understandable, only to the circle of people who experienced the same emotions in fact, and this narrow specialization will be the main disadvantage for some and the main plus for others.