Dark Horse Review

Dark Horse is a short, strange little film that’s likely to get swallowed up by the blockbusters of the summer. This is a shame as whilst far from a perfect picture, it’s well worth taking the time to bask in its peculiar glory. Brought to the screen by cult writer-director Todd Solondz, Dark Horsebegins with a brilliant opening scene in which a party of wedding guests dance joyously to some upbeat popular music. The camera pans around to a table where two invitees remain seated, at odds with the rest of the room. They are Abe and Miranda, a couple of strange, damaged people with whom we are about to spend eighty-five minutes.

Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a thirty-something who still lives with his parents, spends inordinate amounts of money on collectable figurines (well, toys), is prone to extreme mood swings and has all the social capabilities of a tranquilised horse. In his favour are hubristic levels of self-confidence and a doesn’t-know-when-to-quit mentality. After just about coaxing a date out of Miranda (Selma Blair), Abe proposes to her almost immediately. Being of less than entirely sound mind herself, Miranda does not immediately dismiss this out of hand and so begins perhaps the most perplexing romance lately captured on film.

When films go for quirkiness, they can often all too easily fall into eye-gouging twee-ness and simply be incredibly annoying. Wes Anderson flirts dangerously with this at times (as the inestimably innovative Mark Allen will tell you) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie is perhaps the ultimate example of wrong things can go. Solondz artfully sidesteps this pitfall and Dark Horse’s undeniable oddness feels organic rather than contrived. This is down to an excellent performance from Gelber who creates what feels like a real character, with a touch of pathos to match the peculiarities, rather than a gooberish caricature.

Gelber is supported by a full-blooded supporting cast including not only the aforementioned and on good form Blair, but Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow, Justin Bartha and Donna Murphy. Murphy is particularly great as the mysterious secretary who works with Abe at his father (Walken)’s real estate company. As the film progresses, the line between what is real and what is not blurs as Abe’s tenuous grip on reality weakens. This results in some amusing fantasy sequences that similarly play tricks with the viewer’s own beliefs about what is real.

At its heart, Dark Horse is a tragedy – beneath the veneer of cheap laughs of its surface lies a fairly disturbing and often heart-breaking depiction of a desperate man in personal calamity, that no amount of cheesy self-empowering pop ringtones can fix. We’re only given the merest glimpses of what went so wrong for Abe, but the film implies that America is fostering something of a lost generation, a national crisis of confidence, though gladly with none of the bluster that that implies.

As previously stated, it’s by no means perfect and Dark Horse may well frustrate and depress you. However, if you like your American filmmaking pitched somewhere between the everyday outrageousness of Bobcat Goldthwaite and the mumblecore of the Duplass Brothers, you ought to do yourself a favour and treat yourself to one of the most intriguing and unusual films you’re like to see this year.