Shot in the Dark review – a disturbingly realistic exercise in ultraviolence

This gory, lowish-budget thriller is quite competently made on a technical level, with umbral cinematography that is choreographed down to the millimetre along with the flash-cut-heavy editing and shrieky score and sound design. But it is not exactly a fun watch unless you really like lots of violence and jumbled-timeline puzzle stories. It feels like a calling card effort for the team that made it, which includes the co-writer and director, Keene McRae, making his first feature here as well as taking a supporting role, and the actors Kristoffer McMillan and Lane Thomas, who co-wrote the script with McRae and took on assorted other duties off camera. Good luck to them, because they certainly have skills, if a less assured touch with character building.

McMillan plays William, a writer whom we first meet when he is contemplating shooting himself because the grief of losing his wife Lili (Christine Donlon, seen in flashbacks) is too much to bear. Poor William will probably wish he did kill himself after the night he ends up having. This consists of being tied up and tortured in his basement by a serial killer (Austin Hebert) who is disturbed enough to have staged his own abduction by cutting his fingers off and sending them to the police. Why he is out to get William is gradually revealed, although the motives are still a little murky by the end. Perhaps the film-makers intended not to fill in the killer’s backstory in the same way that news outlets now try to minimise covering mass shooters’ stories in order to emphasise victims over murderers. Whatever the reasoning, there is not much explained about our man with the stopwatch and the cardboard box collection except that he is jealous, precise and has a mole.

Still, for all the film’s weak points McMillan isn’t one of them. He gives a wrenching performance here, and can wail with pain as well as any movie scream queen. It is so realistic, in fact, that the film is all the harder to watch for it.