Into the Black

By Jamie Lisk • Jan 29th, 2006 • Category: Drama

Into The Black, director Marc Powers’ second foray into independent filmmaking, is a slick, brilliantly-crafted, metropolitan morality tale that will surely resonate with the viewer long after it has ended. It’s a smart film that assaults the viewer’s sensibilities on two distinct levels. On one, it’s a gritty oblique crime drama in a brash contemporized ‘film noir’ style and on the other, it’s an unapologetically unsettling-to-the-point-of-disorienting psychological drama.

Without a doubt, Into The Black is one of the finest urban crime-thrillers I’ve ever watched, mainstream, indie or otherwise. Powerful and thoughtful, this film left me completely absorbed and staring at a blank TV screen for several minutes after it had ended. Yes, it was really that good!

When his best friend dies, Neil Murphy (Paul Sacks) shows up in town after eight years to attend his funeral. Less than welcoming, the townspeople, including his friend’s sister, Lisa (Sheila Guzman), react to him with an almost aloof resentment. One fellow, a former classmate, even blindsides Neil outside a local tavern, crashing a beer bottle over head. He follows up that unconventional greeting with an ominous warning that unless he wants to end up like his dead friend, he had better get the hell out of town.

Instead of prompting him to leave, the caveat just emboldens Neil to stay and find out more about his friend‘s death. Aided by Lisa’s boyfriend Roger (Tim Gato), Neil begins stalking the city’s dark underbelly in search of clues that will help him unravel the mystery—a mystery that only seems to get stranger with each new clue. Less than subtle himself, Neil’s beat down of a small time smack dealer for information only works to invoke the rage of the town’s mobster, a frosty, calculating widower, Andrea C (Dina Scalfani). After disclosing her lack of involvement in his friend’s death, she offers Neil one more chance to get out of town - or risk incurring the full wrath of her organization.

While contemplating Andrea’s threatening words, Neil soon realizes that getting out is no longer as simple as it sounds. With the discovery of a name, Emily Davis, the clues to his friend’s death quickly start to point in one direction. Neil finds that he might not be as accepting of the answer as he once was. “The cause is hidden, but the result is known,” Ovid once wrote, and for Neil, it seems, he’s known the answer to his friend’s death all along because, sadly, the results of it are everywhere—staring him in the face.

As the film ticks down, there’s an extremely disturbing and ultimately shocking revelation that is so bizarre that it is sure to throw the whole substance of the early part of the film into disarray. If anything, it makes for an interesting follow-up viewing as perspectives are sure to shift on the second go-around.

Paul Sacks, who plays the shadowy outsider, Neil Murphy, is truly great in the film offering up a wonderfully understated performance. A man with many secrets who appears, on the surface, to be a gentle soul, truly interested in doing the right thing by uncovering the truth behind his friend‘s death. However, as the past soon begins to unravel, his benevolent gesture, as it turns out, might just be masking something much darker. This is an intricate role, for sure. The other actor who really impressed me despite her minimal screen time was Sheila Guzman, who, as Lisa, seems to provide the moral centre of the film. Her resentment of Neil seems unfounded—at first. The truth and her knowledge of the past, obfuscated in hush hush barely-spoken dinner table discussions with her boyfriend, Roger, only help to heighten the audience’s infectious unease with the film’s main character Neil. “He didn’t even come home for his own mother’s funeral,” she tells Roger. The seed is planted.

One of the criticisms I’m sure that will be levelled at Marc Powers is the strong influence of director Quentin Tarantino on his final work. It seems every crime genre film made post-Pulp Fiction is criticized for being a clone of that film. Despite his obvious nod to director Quentin Tarantino, including one name quote, and one rather ubiquitous trunk shot, Powers couldn’t be further in style or sensibility from Tarantino. His characters, less a pretext for flamboyant violence, are more complex and harder to distinguish. Complete shades of grey, the perpetrators and the victims seem one and the same and their behaviour is neither condoned or condemned… or exploited. No, Marc Powers isn’t a video store geek searching for street credibility in flashy exaggerated gangsters; rather, it seems, he wants to go the other way—utilizing his genuine knowledge of the street to bring forth more subdued realistic characterizations. The protracted scene involving Neil using a hot cup of coffee as a tool for a parking lot interrogation of a street thug is something of brilliance, and surely something that Tarantino himself might have overlooked in search of a more flashy set-up.

Powers seems to understand and appreciate that quiet is sometimes better than loud - especially in this genre. His distinct knowledge of his craft seems almost out of synch with the predominant style of his peers. From the scene where Sheila Guzman, as the distraught sibling, tips forward in her bathtub to cry over her dead brother, to the slices of metaphorical genius involving Neil’s father and his never-ending squabble with his neighbour over dog shit in the backyard, this is exactly the kind of film that needed to be made in light of so many over-the-top Tarantino knock-offs. Something to remind viewers that crime-dramas don’t always have to be ultra-violent directorial ego trips. Powers himself claims that his biggest filmic influence comes from director Michael Mann of Heat fame, and, for sure, taking into account the almost melodic flow of the film, it shows.

Also, Powers seems to have raided the local indie music scene in order to compile one of the finest soundtracks ever. It includes the talents of DCM, Big Moe, Hybrid 216, Dan Blakeslee, Mike Martell and Corey Cain. The song “Into the Black” performed by Colleen Walsh Cain, is truly beautiful.

This is straight ahead independent filmmaking at its very best.

Four Stars.

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