But you’ll forgive me after watching this stylish-as-hell nightmare noir.
There was a time, shortly after Dark City came out, that I was convinced that its director, Alex Proyas, would be the greatest filmmaker of his generation. Obviously, I was wrong. But you’ll forgive me after watching this stylish-as-hell nightmare noir. Proyas’s intoxicating visual palette borrows liberally from Kafka, German Expressionism, and the dark, rain-slicked alleyways of film noir to weave a story about a cabal of pasty-faced aliens that look like they just walked off the set of Hellraiser and who put humans to sleep at night, freezing them in the middle of whatever they were doing, to study them. Rufus Sewell plays the lone man who knows what’s going on, and Kiefer Sutherland goes full Method sinister and will make your blood freeze. If Clive Barker was making movies for MTV in 1998, this feels like what he might have come up with.