Dear QAnon,
Just a brief note to let you know your narrative fiction horror flick and/or documentary re: the shadowy global cabal of those 1% Comet “Pizza” Eaters, has arrived.
Director and screenwriter Lucca’s film is overwrought and unrelentingly earnest in its pseudo-Libertarian cri de coeur against the Powers the Be versus “the great unwashed.” Dark State runs right up to the point of parodying conspiracy theorists, a hijacked Fifth Estate, Hollywood “elites”, and every other contemporary subreddit bugaboo while desperately trying to convince the viewer that the tentacles of these unseen but monstrous overlords are innumerable and encircle all life on earth, all while more or less hiding in plain sight. (Think Cthulhu wearing a freshly flayed Alex Jones skin suit or, yeahno, maybe don’t do that: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.)
Lucca’s script focuses on Alicia Gazzara (O’Rourke), formerly an investigative reporter at a major Philly daily but now, following a marital train wreck, a broken and borderline alcoholic has-been working for a lowly Hammonton, N. J. newspaper. Barely hanging in even at this lower rung, her reportorial intuition is suddenly dialed up to “11” when a bizarre, late-night car crash involving three dead men with notably bizarre backstories happens, and the only survivor is a childhood friend of Alicia’s who is currently on the verge of Hollywood stardom. She snags the assignment from her editor and runs with it, quickly discovering that the three deceased male passengers were a motley crew indeed: a retired General Intelligence officer who specialized in Psychology-Ops and co-wrote The Satanic Bible in his free time; a billionaire heir to a $26 billion pharmaceutical fortune; and, just to keep things increasingly batshit crazy, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas(!).
Lucca’s screenplay tosses in casual references to Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Charles Manson, and George W. Bush alongside a quote from Goethe. An unintentionally comic montage in which Alicia is shown burning the midnight oil in fast motion to a soundtrack simulacrum of sub-Winger Eighties hair metal while utilizing a corkboard covered with faded news clippings, thumbtacks, and those cinematically traditional lengths of red yarn. Aha! The game is afoot!
It’s hardly a spoiler to note that Dark State’s depiction of a shadow reality founded on craven characters oozing ill-gotten monies and blood-stained power, wannabe movie stars who’ll do anything for their big break, candlelit witching hour rituals, and the pronouncement by one character that “It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” is Lucca’s idea of true conspiratorial horror.
It also isn’t afraid to speak truth to power, but its clarion call is thoroughly, totally, utterly undone by 93 minutes of wooden acting, cringeworthy dialogue (E.g. “You have no idea how deep this goes,” “The fish rots from the head down,” “Nobody gets out of here alive,” and “Free will is a beautiful thing”), and an omnipresent amateurish feel to the entire production.
At times Dark State almost feels like it might actually work as a gonzo double bill with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. But no, this histrionic and humorless slice of our warped zeitgeist drives its “ripped from the headlines” point home with all the subtlety of a Steve Bannon/Roger Stone Speedo™-sponsored mud wrestling contest. That might be your cup of Bilderbergian-flavored hydroxychloroquine paranoiac politics but I found it to be yet another depressing reminder of how far we’ve fallen since Stephen Colbert first coined the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report way back in October of 2005.
This article appears in March 19 • 2021.