Though it may not have fared terribly well upon releasing across North America a few months ago – a mooted box office coupled with underwhelming reviews – Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Dark Places is yet to release for those in the United Kingdom, and today’s new trailer quietly reminds moviegoers across the pond that, yes, the thriller is still very much on the way.
Lifted from Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, Paquet-Brenner’s crime drama pits Charlize Theron in the lead role as Libby Day, the estranged daughter who witnessed her mother and two sisters mercilessly slaughtered in an event that went down in history as The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas when she was only seven. Shortly thereafter, Libby attributed blame on her older brother (Ant-Man‘s Corey Stoll) who was shipped off to serve an overlong (and possibly unjust?) prison sentence.
Fast forward two and a half decades later and Dark Places finds Theron’s lead protagonist crossing paths with her Mad Max: Fury Road co-star Nicholas Hoult, an ambiguous sleuth who acts as a member of the Kill Club, a clandestine cult that specialize in seemingly impossible cases. What these group of vigilant analysts discover sheds a whole new light on Libby’s experience of the event, and it isn’t long before our lead begins to question her own memory of that fateful night.
Also starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks and Drea de Matteo, Dark Places failed to reach the heights of fellow Flynn adaptation Gone Girl when it first released. Perhaps the staged release schedule hamstrung the feature film before it get going in earnest or, as we pointed out before, it came down to the bland and unremarkable rendition of the story.
Originally released across the States back in August, Entertainment One will bring Dark Places across the pond for a release in February 2016.
Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She’ll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby’s search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.