Diamond Skulls

I bought this movie for 99 cents at K-mart several years back (along with "Hawken's Breed") figuring anything with Gabriel Byrne and Amanda Donahoe is surely worth that much. It wasn't. "Dark Obsession" (the title I bought it under) was a slight cut above "Hawken's Breed" (IMBD rated at 2.4), but not enough to allow me to even keep it in the house. I threw both movies in the trash.

This thing fails on so many levels it's hard to narrow it down, but let's just say it's tawdry, incredible, boring, hedonistic, confusing and even at 100 minutes, way too long.

I love Byrne as an actor, but this schlock really looks bad on his resume.

This movie is perhaps the most compelling--and starkly fascinating--example of a filmmaker's ability to reveal the subtleties of psychology and class, and their combined effect on the an individual's actions. It's also terrifically fun to watch, make no mistake. When Viscount Bucton (Gabriel Byrne) accidentally (or with subconscious intent) kills a woman in a hit and run accident (thinking that it was his wife on an adulterous assignation) his upper-class army friends rally around him to protect one of their own. When Bucton's middle-class friend, Jamie, consumed by guilt, reveals the secret of what really happened that rainy night, he is first brutally ostracized, then framed, then killed. Rarely has the British class structure been so starkly and elegantly stripped of its "Disney" affectations, and shown for what it is. Wonderful performances, also, from Judy Parfitt as Bucton's mother, the Countess of Crune, and Michael Hordern and his father, the Earl of Crune. Bravo to acclaimed social documentarian Nick Broomfield, who turns his unsparing eye to a film that deserves a much wider distribution than it received, and which ought to be acknowledged as a dramatic triumph of Dickensian scope, beautifully and hauntingly photographed, magnificently acted, and powerfully--and tragically-- resonant. This is a profoundly intelligent film that requires a little more sophistication than the average filmgoer possesses, and will likely be a little too complicated for some viewers who might be better served by fluffier, more "Hollywood," fare.

Even before I saw another review that was just titled Gabriel Byrne, I was also thinking "great actor" and he sort of elevates the movie overall. You may not think he does make a difference, but he really shows his quality even at times when it can't really help.

There's also one flashback that is shown quite often (including nudity and violence), which is way too much - or hammering it too hard (home). There's a theme about rich people and the way they feel society owes them and they are a bit above the law. Consciousness and some sense of morality sometimes give them a pause though ... but for how long? And also: effective enough?

"Dark Obsession" is a stylish, sexy story of the place where love becomes something darker, and where friendship and loyalty to an ideal become a reason to circumvent justice at all costs. When a drunk English aristocrat (Gabriel Byrne) driving a friend's car accidentally kills a woman, his friends cover it up. When one of them has a crisis of conscience, he is obliquely warned to examine where his loyalties lie. Meanwhile, the aristocrat's wife (Amanda Donohoe) is wrestling with her own marital secrets and her own obsessions.

Directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield, "Dark Obsession" is one of the most chilling ever dramatic commentaries on the British class system and its codes of honour. The film may be too sophisticated for the average American viewer to pick up the nuances (as seen by the other review of this film in this forum) but stands alone as a superb family drama with stellar performances from Byrne, Donohoe, as well as the incomparable Judy Parfitt as the family matriarch, and is one of the most underrated films of its kind. Highly recommended.

This cold-blooded dissection of English upper-class immorality begins when brooding aristocrat Gabriel Byrne kills a woman while on a drunken drive through London, and his old-school pals, along for the ride, decide not to report the accident. It's a great hook, but no one can think of anything to hang on it. There's a teasing suggestion that the hit-and-run might not have been entirely accidental, but what begins to develop as a mystery emerges, instead as a vague character study, although it's unclear if that character is meant to be (in a portentous metaphor) England herself. The film could have been twice as fascinating at half the length; too much of the slim 87 minute running time is padded with Byrne's sexual domination fantasies (which no doubt explain the NC-17 rating), and with redundant scenes of the idle, decadent rich at play: regimental buddies riding piggyback around the dining room, and so forth.