And of course, occult rites are their own form of this as well.

Even in A Dark Song, Sophia undergoes the torment of the ritual experience because she CAN believe that gold flakes of redemption will fall from heaven over her grief.

Countless attempts have to have been made and fail in order for the rules to be understood in the ways that Solomon purports to understand them in A Dark Song.

Failure is truly terrible in a ritual like this. Demonic, soul-eating, existence-voiding.

How many people must have ended in a slip?

The ritual is, all of the time, convoluted, strange, and intensely precise.

There’s a bug here that crawled into my brain:

Allowing occult ritual to be real, how is it discovered to work?

The tone is dark, discomfiting. The ritual, much of the time, takes the form of abuse.

We have to wonder if Solomon is truly afraid of error or taking advantage of Sophia to live a fantasy of holding arcane wisdom and authority. Is that flake of light a sign or a tormented hallucination?

The film’s events are isolated, its scenes protracted. We are inside the process.

It’s not a one-room story, but it is a one-house story, and I can’t help but imagine how engrossing this would be staged as a live play.

Once Sophia and Solomon enter the home they’ve rented to undertake this months-long ritual, we watch it unfold, step by step, doubt by doubt, omen by omen.

This is the duration of the film.

In Jaws, it’s the inkling of doubt amid self certainty that shapes the hero’s journey. In Dangerous Animals, it shapes the villain’s fall.

The sharks in both films are ultimately the stakes and not the conflict. Even if they’re very good at chomping. And breathtaking to watch.

Enjoy the dive!

However, Tucker has caught a more dangerous creature than he expects in his net. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) is an off-grid surfer and a survivor.

Despite holding control, Tucker’s performances toward Zephyr seem intent to prove his superiority. Something we can also tell he doesn’t truly believe.