Honestly, I'm having a hard time starting this review. This film was so middle of the road, neither bad or good that it wasn't memorable in the least. I felt like it was erased from my mind the second I turned it off. The Dark is basically a bunch of horror cliche's thrown together in an almost random fashion. In particular, it borrows largely from the American remake of The Ring.

A woman and her teenage daughter go to visit her father in Wales, I believe, I don't care enough to make sure I'm right, somewhere in Northern Europe, where the weather is chilly and the coasts are rocky. Immediately things are not what they seem.

The mother begins by having a very realistic dream about her daughter dying. The sheep have gone mental and start jumping off cliffs, nearly taking the daughter with them. Then the daughter has the good sense to fall in the ocean. A large search for her supposed drowned body, finds nothing. Soon the mother sees a girl that looks very much like her, and chases her into a creepy barn, in the middle of the night of course, where dark shadows lie and ghostly white skin prevails.

Then the mother does the classic, let's spell out the whole plot real nice like for everybody thing, and goes to the library to look at the town records on the, only in the movies, microfilm machine. She finds some mythology about the town being taken over by a pastor who lead everyone to commit suicide off the cliffs and of course he had a daughter the same age who looks very similar, who didn't want to die, and invoked some spell about taking another life for her own... blah, blah, blah.

It's all just an excuse to have the creepy little girl, stalk around in the shadows, jumping out with a loud bang now and again. So the mom has to save her daughter from this girl and her evil father. Then the filmmakers got bored and threw in about ten twists in the last ten minutes, so you don't know what the hell just happened, nor do you care.

It's too bad that those involved in The Dark, couldn't have had a better and more original script. Sean Bean and Maria Bello, both fine actors, seem to being trying to make it through this crap, but also seem uninspired. The film looks great, beautifully shot, good effective lighting and composition. But it felt like a 100 other horror films I've seen all kind of mashed together, which is too bad, because they wasted a great title.