dark tourist film

Film Review: ‘Dark Tourist’

Michael Cudlitz's first leading role is the sole selling point of this repellent character study.

By Geoff Berkshire

Geoff Berkshire

Associate Editor, Features

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Character actor Michael Cudlitz ‘s first leading role is the sole selling point of “ Dark Tourist ,” a well-acted but rote and ultimately repellent character study of a psychologically disturbed loner. Bleak and ponderous picture feels much longer than its 80-minute running time and manages none of the lurid pull of its varied influences, including “ Taxi Driver ,” “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” and “The Crying Game.” Unsurprisingly, limited theatrical exposure was a dead end, while simultaneous VOD release seems a better bet to attract feel-bad junkies.

Yonkers security guard Jim Tahna (Cudlitz) visits the rural California hometown of one of his favorite killers, Carl Marznap (Pruitt Taylor Vince), and forges disquieting bonds with two locals: a widowed waitress ( Melanie Griffith , a warm, welcome presence) and a seductive prostitute (Suzanne Quast, credible in a physically demanding role). Director Suri Krishnamma (“A Man of No Importance”) and actor-turned-writer Frank John Hughes adopt a serious-minded approach to potentially exploitative material, opting for escalating dread over graphic violence as Jim retraces Carl’s steps. Yet the lack of any deeper insight or meaning shines through in the abundance of expository voiceover and predictable, simplistic payoff.

Reviewed online, West Hollywood, Aug. 30, 2013. Running time: 80 MIN.

• Production: A Phase 4 Films release of a Vision Entertainment Group presentation in association with Suzanne DeLaurentiis Prods. and House of Huge. Produced by Zachery Bryan, Adam Targum, Suzanne DeLaurentiis, Michael Cudlitz, Frank John Hughes. Executive producer, Rick Matros. Co-producers, Stephen Fromkin, Ivan Kavalsky.
• Crew: Directed by Suri Krishnamma. Screenplay, Frank John Hughes. Camera (color), Ricardo Jacques Gale; editor, Justin Guerrieri; music, Austin Wintory; production designer, Gershom Hyldreth; set decorator, Yuki Nakamura; costume designer, Maria Lorenzana; sound, Alexander X. Hutchinson; supervising sound editors, John W. Frost, Patrick O. Bird; re-recording mixer, Frost; visual effects, KromA; stunt coordinator, Cole McKay; line producer, Jude Tucker; associate producer, Mark Holder, Alex Matros; assistant director, Antonio Grana; casting, Dori Zuckerman, Lorna Johnson.
• With: Michael Cudlitz, Melanie Griffith, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Suzanne Quast.

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Dark Tourist

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Melanie Griffith (Betsy) Michael Cudlitz (Jim) Pruitt Taylor Vince (Carl Marznap) Bradley Joseph (Manny) Eddie J. Fernandez (Osvaldo) Suzanne Quast (Iris) Linda S. Wong (LA Female Reporter) Waymond Lee (Office Worker) Joan McCarthy (AA participant) Donna Ponterotto (Gerry)

Suri Krishnamma

A psychological-thriller in the haunting tradition of films like Taxi Driver and Monster, The Grief Tourist takes us into the chilling labyrinth of a man's dark hobby and his even darker mind. JIM TAHANA doesn't leave much of an impression when he passes you by. But look closer and you'll sense his hunger - the deep hunger of an insatiable American soul - always scanning to devour something - anything that might fill the searing, unexplained void within him. Jim obsesses over the hobby that has been part of his DNA since he was a young boy: grief tourism - the act of traveling with the intent to visit places of tragedy or disaster. Every year his week-long vacations from work are spent going to grief tourist locations in the lives of different serial killers he is fascinated with. This years obsession is Carl Marznap, a mass murderer from New Orleans, Louisiana. But this trip is no ordinary vacation as Jim's rancid sexual impulses and weakening grip on reality deteriorate into a violent despair that will ultimately unlock an unspeakable secret festering within him, bringing The Dark Tourist to it's brutal and shocking finale...

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Movie review: ‘Dark Tourist’ overstays its welcome

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Grossly underappreciated for his harrowing work on TV’s “Southland,” Michael Cudlitz is an explosive actor masterful at keeping that energy (barely) under control, buzzing just below the surface. He does so again — initially, at least — in director Suri Krishnamma’s psychological thriller, originally titled “The Grief Tourist.”

Jim, a Yonkers security guard on the graveyard shift, spends his vacations visiting the haunts of serial killers. It’s a macabre hobby, but he defends it: How is his trip to California to see the crime scenes of 1960s arsonist Carl Marznap (Pruitt Taylor Vince) any different from visiting Dealey Plaza in Dallas or ground zero in New York?

Along the way, he strikes up a friendship with small-town waitress Betsy (Melanie Griffith, who’s still pretty adorable) and has a chance at a normal life. But through his hard-boiled voice-over — a device that works when you have a loner antihero in constant conversation with himself and the long-deceased object of his obsession — we glean that Jim shares traumatizing experiences with Carl and fears the evil lurking within himself.

Capably photographed by Ricardo Jacques Gale in muted, almost sepia, tones, “Dark Tourist” gets bogged down in insufferably slow-moving scenes — interestingly, when Jim is interacting with others, despite consummate performances from Cudlitz and Griffith. Then Jim’s tenuous hold on reality slips out of his grasp, and he’s reeling, as are we, as Krishnamma’s psychological simmer bursts into a grotesque, exploitive mess.

----------------------

“Dark Tourist”

MPAA rating: None

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Playing: TCL Chinese 6, Hollywood

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Watch Dark Tourist

• 1 hr 21 min
• 5.0   (1,180)

Dark Tourist is a 2012 psychological thriller drama directed by Suri Krishnamma and written by Frank John Hughes. It stars Melanie Griffith, Michael Cudlitz and Pruitt Taylor Vince in the lead roles. The movie follows the journey of Jim, a man who works as a security guard at a low-rent hotel. He is a man who is fascinated by death and violence, and who travels to notorious sites of tragedy and disaster around the world. Jim heavily documents his travels with a camcorder, and spends much of his time in these places alone, seemingly without regard for his own safety.

Jim's latest trip takes him to New Orleans, the site of a devastating Hurricane Katrina, where he encounters Betsy, a prostitute played by Melanie Griffith. Despite Betsy's tired and jaded demeanor, she sparks something in Jim, and he starts to open up to her in ways that he has rarely done before. As he continues on his travels, Jim finds himself becoming more and more reckless, moving from one dangerous location to another with a newfound sense of urgency.

As Jim's behavior becomes more erratic and his travels take him to ever more dangerous places across the globe - from a hotel where a mass shooting occurred to a site where a bomb was detonated - it becomes clear that his obsession with seeing and filming tragedy first-hand is driving him to the brink of madness.

The film is a character study of one man's descent into isolation, obsession and morbidity. In terms of tone, Dark Tourist is a bleak and unsettling film, exploring themes of trauma and obsession, and the human desire to confront and gaze upon pain and suffering. The film's distinctive visual style, moody soundtrack and strong performances contribute to a tense and haunting atmosphere.

Melanie Griffith portrays Betsy with a restrained and emotionally vulnerable performance, capturing the character's sense of disillusionment and vulnerability. Michael Cudlitz delivers a convincingly twisted portrayal of a man falling into the abyss of his own obsession, and Pruitt Taylor Vince expertly plays Jim's placid and unassuming personality.

Overall, Dark Tourist is a bleak and intense drama that explores the troubled psyche of an individual fixated on the macabre. It's a film that will engage those who are fascinated by human behavior and our darker impulses, and will leave you thinking long after the credits have rolled.

Dark Tourist is a 2012 thriller with a runtime of 1 hour and 21 minutes. It has received mostly poor reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 5.0 and a MetaScore of 40.

• Genres Thriller Drama
• Cast Michael Cudlitz Melanie Griffith Pruitt Taylor Vince
• Director Suri Krishnamma
• Release Date 2012
• MPAA Rating R
• Runtime 1 hr 21 min
• Language English
• IMDB Rating 5.0   (1,180)
• Metascore 40

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‘Dark Tourist’ Review: Netflix’s Morally Murky Docuseries Takes a Whimsical Look at Global Disasters and Atrocities

Steve greene.

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Whether a feature or a bug, one of the central aspects of the Netflix documentary series “Somebody Feed Phil” is that host Phil Rosenthal is an unabashed outsider. Going to places he doesn’t understand with an open mind and an open palate, it’s a celebration of global cuisine from the point of view of somebody who is experiencing everything for the first time. It’s an approach that works for that show, but it’s strange to see that same humor and surface-level fascination in service of something with far more dramatic weight than a snack from a street vendor.

David Farrier’s new series “ Dark Tourist ” takes a broad categorization of unconventional global tourist destinations and approaches them with the same voyeuristic tone and format, treating a whole host of global oddities as a set of minor curiosities. The result is a slippery documentary exercise that never ends up illuminating the thing that sets out to capture in the first place, if there was a unified goal for these expeditions all in the first place.

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The eight-episode season is broken up mainly by geographic region. One installment sees Farrier traverse Japan, taking some ill-advised trips to areas of Fukushima still drenched in nuclear fallout, and a jaunt through the Aokigahara forest where many people have died by suicide. Grouping these suspect trips by location is an extremely loose way of gathering them together — any attempts to tie them together thematically are tangential at best.

So with each new destination, the overall thesis of the show gets muddier. Hopping between so many locations over the course of 40 minutes puts all of these experiences on a common practical and ethical plane. In many instances, that’s just not the case. “Dark Tourist” is a bizarre amalgam of ill-advised destination profiles, snapshots of individuals with adjustable moral centers, local customs framed as odd by a crew of outside observers. The series’ problems stem directly from the title, a banner that quickly paints anything unfamiliar that Farrier encounters as “bad.”

At some point in a number of these excursions, Farrier’s voiceover narration has a sentence that starts with something like “It’s kind of weird that…” From a mere presentational standpoint, it might be enough to frame all of these trips through this peculiar fascination perspective. But not all of these pursuits have a concrete sense of context to go with them.

The half-hearted attempts to come to any philosophical or moral conclusion at the end of these trips feels like JD at the end of any “Scrubs” episode, neatly summarizing something about the human condition. It’s a decent starting point in theory, but when the final message of his faux Mexican border crossing tour is “For real migrants, this is never fun,” it’s an awfully thin conclusion to draw from a subject that deserves more than someone’s passing whims. Many of these diversions bring out the relative intellectual curiosity of someone wondering where they left their car keys.

Farrier’s approach makes more sense in a longform project. The first-person approach to his 2015 doc “Tickled” worked because it was Farrier allowing a certain level of transparency into an obsessive search for the truth behind a nagging curiosity. After falling down a very particular rabbit hole, that journey led to a single individual. When that same approach gets applied to an existing set of traditions, a thriving subculture, or a questionable institution, the understanding ends at Farrier’s own personal perspective. It’s a poor match for subjects that demand a fuller view beyond an outsider’s cursory first impressions and little else.

Framing this show through Farrier’s eyes limits the real effectiveness of this as any sort of journalistic exercise. We get plenty of examples of why he’s interested in these places, but aside from the odd quick interview with a momentary traveling companion, a lot of the people who come to these places as a tourist exercise are often lumped into one very broad psychological generalization. If there’s any attempts made to understand why someone might be drawn to the hunting ground of serial killer or drawn in by the allure of Pablo Escobar tours in Medellín, it’s a small sample size by virtue of the number of people going alongside Farrier. Taking the view of somebody who’s just going to come in for a few hours saps the deeper understanding of what’s going on inside and behind so many of the practices that he’s seemingly trying to understand.

That thin level of understanding is doubly frustrating when usually there’s one story per episode that merits some longer investigation. Boiling these segments down to roughly 15 minutes inevitably leads to some oversimplification. Trying to orient a viewer to a brand new cultural perspective or common practice in another part of the world doesn’t leave a lot of time for nuance. And something like the debate over the acceptable levels of in Nazi memorabilia in WWII recreations gets a relative shrug because there’s just not enough time to get into it.

“Dark Tourist” also has a strange relationship to levity. Farrier’s a funny guy, and there’s a version of this show that capitalizes on his particular charm as a presenter. But it becomes clear over the course of these episodes that the show’s coping mechanism for handling the darker side of these experiences is to joke about them. It’s understandable as a momentary reaction to something unsettling, but when that attitude creeps into the voiceover, it often seems like a flippant response to something that should be more thoughtful.

And on top of that, Farrier’s narration here may start out as charming, but it comes to signify something sloppy about the way a lot of these segments are put together. There’s truly startling footage in “Dark Tourist,” but whenever there’s something close to being insightful, Farrier‘s voice comes in to overemphasize or catch up things that should be evident from what’s seen rather than heard.

With this pursuit, it’s inescapable that some of the things that the series shows would make a viewer uncomfortable. But there’s little in “Dark Tourist” to mitigate the nagging suspicion that a lot of these segments are suspect from the outset. There are plenty of questions to be had about many of the things “Dark Tourist” wants to capture. It just seems like this show never asks the right ones.

“Dark Tourist” is now available to stream on Netflix.

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