Dariuss 2023

From Dariuss, the film unfolds a brutal, unsettling tale centered on a family shattered by the disappearance of their daughter after she is filmed in a park without her knowledge. Archibald Kane as The Husband anchors the emotional core, while the rest of the family grapples with their grief in starkly different, sometimes disturbing ways. The presence of a sinister figure, Guerrilla Metropolitana as The Maniac, alongside a pregnant woman known as The Woman, portrayed by Ila Argent, casts a shadow over a night that grows increasingly uncanny and threatening.

The narrative never shows the girl’s fate directly, but it hints at murder and possibly rape. The story then widens to track a nightmarish constellation of perspectives on the family’s pain, set against a London night where reality shifts into troubling visions: a child’s strange sexual drawings, a figure in a torchlit forest manipulating two rag dolls, a pair of child’s underwear, and an empty milk bottle left in an abandoned house. These fragments mingle with the father’s private torment—drinking chocolate in his car and crying—and the grandmother’s bizarre ritual of filling bottles with breast milk, while the mother torments herself in front of a mirror, crying and taking barbiturates.

As the film pushes deeper into its disturbing psychology, the mother and grandmother engage in incestuous acts, a sequence underscored by a painting of the dead girl that appears repeatedly throughout the story. Each family member processes grief in a starkly different, increasingly aberrant way, blurring the line between sorrow and harm in a room already charged with dread.

The intrusion of a mysterious, disturbing figure—carrying a baby-like voice, a handheld camera, and the severed scalp glimpsed at the film’s start—shatters the family’s fragile sense of safety. The home becomes a scene of unimaginable violence and madness: the sleeping mother is attacked, decapitated, and then violated in a brutal turn; the grandmother is raped and her innards are devoured, while the father, who has contemplated suicide, drains the elderly woman’s breast milk, masturbates before his daughter’s painting, and is then attacked by the young maniac and devoured as the attacker films the carnage. The discovery that the daughter’s father also possessed a camera tripod raises haunting questions about who bears responsibility for the disappearance.

Amid the massacre, the dead girl reappears as a ghost at the scene, assuming the look of the girl in the painting. The family cat is killed, and the maniac, having completed his grim harvest, leaves to seek another house to invade, continuing the cycle of fear as he moves toward a new victim. The film lingers on the collision of grief, violence, and the uncanny, resisting simple answers while presenting a relentless, panoramic portrait of a family unraveling under the weight of a nightmarish +truths+ that refuses to stay buried.