Dark River

Ruth Wilson carries this film in devastating fashion, through the dark, cold, windy, and disorientating farmland of northern England, where sister and brother vie for tenancy of their deceased father's land. With the menace of Winter's Bone and the tragic tone of Tim Roth's War Zone, the pain of an abused - an emotional cripple trying to forge through the trauma that transcends past and present - has never been made more precipitant than in Dark River. Words ring harsh, blows and falls are felt - this is one that lives you feeling wounded. Precede at your own risk.

It's a sad story of family trauma and an attempt to go home many years later. The photography is superb. The acting is powerful. It works very well as a film overall. I don't want to say any more at the risk of spoiling it for you if you haven't yet seen it but it is well worth watching.

As for the negative reviews, I suggest you ignore them. This was never intended to be a super-hero action movie. It's a drama and it does what it sets out to do very well.

Ruth Wilson puts in a strong performance in 'Dark River', playing a young farmer who inherits her family's troubled legacy. She's good, but the film never completely escapes its "grim up north" sensibility, as a story unfolds of unmitigated harshness in a world inhabited only the by the terminally taciturn. One can credit the writers for not tossing in a throwaway romance; but without hope, it's hard to sustain the interest of the audience.

Let me start on a positive note, the acting in this movie is very good. Ruth Wilson in particular, as always, played her role spot on. But I'm sad to say that's the only thing this movie has going for it. There is really no real storyline, unless I missed something? It's very vague and suggests that there was trauma in the woman's past, aside from that it's an hour and a half of an unstable man having mental breakdowns and yelling at people. But I blame none of this on the actors, the directors and writers should have added something. At the end of this movie I feel like I'm in the same place as when I watched the trailer prior, and I really wanted to like this one, it was supposed to be fantastic and Ruth Wilson is perfect in all her films and shows.

I give this a 6/10 based solely on Wilson's performance, otherwise I would give it a 3/10

If it had a better script, a better telling of the story and a better director this could have been a great film, instead it is just a farming fighting siblings plod along, sometimes hard to understand the accents, and with a lot of films that don't actually tell you what going to happen, but you can sort of work it out, well with this there is no working out, the whole story line is flawed, and there is not enough dialogue to help you understand the full story. Shame really Ruth Wilson does a fantastic job, if one did not know better she could have been that person, and not a film star, the rest of the cast did what they had to do with such a bad script...........Great scenery, mostly filmed i think in North Yorkshire.