I am a sucker for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic horror. Pre-millennial big budget Bible stuff like End of Days, Bless the Child, Lost Souls or Prophesy? I’m there with popcorn! Post 9/11 end-of-civilization disaster flicks like Vanishing on 7^th Street, 2012, Pulse, or the remake of Dawn of the Dead? Hells to the yeah! Whether it’s realistic depictions of the end of the world like The Day After Tomorrow, Threads or The War Game, or ridiculous sci-fi like Night of the Comet, Damnation Alley, or Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, I will be first in line to see your what-happens-after-the-end movie. This is all by means to say I was predisposed to like Broken Darkness.

Broken Darkness has its moment, but suffers at times from a slow pace and an audience that has seen The Walking Dead, so we are already used to this narrative – post-end monsters bad, post-end humans worse, scarcity and the unknown are part of the daily existence of people who don’t remember to wash their faces – and want to see something new and different with it.

The film opens on the night meteors crash onto Earth, destroying all life on the surface.  As disaster sequences go, not bad. Rather than cheap CG (looking at you, Syfy!), the film uses mostly footage from real world disasters which conveys a sense of global and local destruction. Sam (Sean Cameron Michael) and his son John (Toke Lars Bjarke) attempt to hide in a local mine where the shaft elevator is set to take the last group down when another man attempts to take Sam’s place in the elevator and accidentally shoots and kills John, leaving Sam broken, just like the rest of the world.

The film then flashes forward to eight years later (a bit too short a duration for the rebirth of the surface we will see in the second half of the film and the cannibal mutants to mutate in the mines, but okay, I’ll go along). Everyone in “Kentucky Station” works to keep the air flowing and the food growing. Sam, his friend Troy (Brandon Auret) along with young Rose (Suraya Rose Santos), who is about the age John would have been had he lived, are tasked with going to “Winnipeg Station,” another mine community rather far away underground, to help with repairs. In the tunnels, however, are heavily armed bandits and “Frenzied” – people whose brains have been fried by a fungus from the meteor dust that for all practical purposes turns them into zombies or related infected (see: 28 Days Later for non-zombie zombies). Eventually Sam, Troy and Rose must go up to the surface where they discover everyone up there has seen The Walking Dead and turned themselves into armed encampments competing for resources and hiding from the Frenzied.

Perhaps that is my issue with Broken Darkness: it checks all the boxes of post-apocalyptic storytelling but it seems to be doing them to check the boxes. There is not really a larger story or character arc here. The film spends a great deal of time showing Sam is ornery and broken but has a heart of gold in there somewhere. John’s death serves no purpose in the overall narrative, the Frenzied seem as much deus ex machina as real threat in this world, showing up when needed, and most of the supporting cast blends into a single character I call “dirty-looking guy in the mine.”

Having said that, the acting is fine (although Sam needs to be much more interesting to be a protagonist, no disrespect to Sean Cameron Mitchell who isn’t given much by the script), and the cinematography isn’t bad. It’s just repetitive in the underground and then on the surface you’d never know it had all burned down from the meteors as they emerge in a beautiful forest outside of the set of The Walking Dead (okay, I’ll stop, but you get my point). Broken Darkness could have been a really interesting 90 minute film, but feels bloated and aimless at two hours. I’m still going to watch the director’s next film, though, as it shows promise. A good script and Christopher-Lee dos Santos might really deliver a film worth watching.

6 out of 10