Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Out of Darkness’ on Paramount+ with Showtime, a Smart, Dynamic Prehistoric-Humans Horror-Thriller

Out of Darkness (now on Paramount+ with Showtime) proves that we’ve come a long way since Raquel Welch wore a fur bikini. Director Andrew Cumming’s debut feature is an early-hominid thriller striving for a level of authenticity befitting its 45,000-years-ago setting. Wittingly or not, the filmmaker, in shooting on location in the primordial-looking Scottish highlands and inventing a language specifically for the film, mirrors another landmark in the Neanderthals-‘n’-such subgenre, 1981’s Quest for Fire – although Cumming puts more clothing on his characters, and less emphasis on the disturbingly apelike sexytimes between early man and early woman. He also differentiates the work by framing the drama as what-the-hell-is-beyond-the-edge-of-the-firelight horror, with highly effective results.

OUT OF DARKNESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The circumference of the firelight is about yea big. How far until the darkness threatens to swallow you? Maybe 10 feet? Well, within this space, six humans sit. It’s a tense space. They’re isolated from their kind. In a barren hell. Cold. Hungry. Angry. Adem (Chuku Modu) is their leader. He led them to this windswept, rocky place – where no seed will find its purchase? Yes. Where no seed will find its purchase – seeking a bounty of warm caves and herds of animals to hunt. His promise is yet unfulfilled. Ave (Iola Evans) is heavy with Adem’s unborn child. Geirr (Kit Young) is Adem’s younger brother, second in charge. Heron (Luna Mwezi) is Adem’s pre-teen son. Odal (Arno Leuning) is an elder, a doctor or mystic. And finally, there’s Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green). She’s a “stray.” She doesn’t belong. She eats last – when there’s food.

The camera sits deep in the black with the fire in the background and in the foreground a shape darts through the frame. We see it, but these prehistoric wanderers don’t. What is it? Not sure. Is it earthly or… other? Again, not sure. Depends on the kind of movie this is.

The next day, the group continues its nomadic trek. Adem and Geirr’s hunt goes fruitless although they find blood on the rocks next to a large set of bones. They keep it a secret from the others. At night the group hears noises in the dark in the distance. Shrieks and howls. At day they struggle through the mist and see a deep forest ahead of them and Adem says they will not go through it, they will go around. His wisest decision yet, perhaps? Beyah touches the blood on her pants between her legs, and Ave reassures her: At least Beyah will be useful to Adem now where before she was expendable. They move on; Ave struggles; Odal says she and the child inside will die if they don’t eat soon. 

One night so very hungry by the fire they hear infernal squeals from the blackness. Something snatches Heron and takes him screaming into the dark and a fiery Adem chases it into the deep forest. It’s his son. It’s his son. The sounds are horrendous. After a moment Geirr reluctantly follows his brother. Odal is in a froth. He says he knows what’s happening: Beyah is bleeding. She is “on heat.” The demon out there senses it. She will need to be sacrificed to it in order to save the others. Ain’t that just like a man.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Out of Darkness is akin to Robert Eggers directing a Quest for Fire remake. And what with the wily young female protag and existential terror of the Whatever in the woods, it’s very much reminiscent of the 2022 Predator spinoff Prey. 

Performance Worth Watching: Is Beyah giving us Final Girl vibes? AIN’T SAYIN’. But Oakley-Green shows the toughness and confidence here that tells us she’s ripe to be cast as a Jedi and ruined by Star Wars – or more preferably turn up in a rad A24 indie and show us her range. 

Memorable Dialogue: Odal: “The danger in bringing light to a dark place is that you might find out what lives in the darkness.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It’s tempting to label prehistoric stories like Out of Darkness gimmickry, but Cumming mostly cuts through the wow-that’s-authentic components of his film – and by that token, the temptation to find flaws in them – with big ideas. It’s an ingenious approach: He sticks to Beyah’s point-of-view, opening the narrative to an exploration of gender and power dynamics (Adem asserts his alpha status directly at Beyah), and opens questions about why this group of humans split from the safety of a larger clan (were they exiled, like the family in Eggers’ The Witch?). What happened to tribalism? As the threat to the group intensifies, it inspires contemplation of the relationship between human nature and war, implying that fear drives us to irrationality and that evil isn’t born, but made, like a social construct.

Cumming’s direction is savvy and concise, the visuals fleshing out the themes of a minimalist story: He uses mostly natural lighting, employs transitions to convey the characters’ disorientation, creates a beautifully esoteric vibe with a sequence set beneath the eerie glow of the aurora borealis (imagine seeing that inexplicable phenomena in the sky as a primitive culture) and effectively uses thunder and lightning to emphasize the drama during the climax. There were moments when stripping down the flourishes might’ve made the film stylistically bolder – say, eliminating altogether the percussive score, which goes CLACKITY CLACKITY CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK during the most intense moments; consider how suffocating silence can be when characters huddle by a fire, surrounded by a void. Out of Darkness is a top-to-bottom confident, scary, thoughtful and memorable film when it could’ve been a perfectly fine in-the-moment thriller. But that doesn’t seem to be Cumming’s M.O., not at all.

Our Call: More from Cumming, please. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.