The Strange Dark (2024) A Cosy Thriller Where The Twilight Zone Invades a Hallmark Movie

Whether in the age of Star Wars, The Avengers or something smaller, Sci-fi has always been overshadowed by spectacle, which is an odd state of play for a genre fundamentally concerned with ideas. Even if the likes of Star Trek reign supreme on small screens, yet even as spectacle dominates, a different lineage of smaller-scale sci-fi has flourished, epitomised by one of the genre’s greatest pop-culture icons: The Twilight Zone. I bring this up because there’s a certain line of criticism that equates being like Rod Serling’s creation as a negative. I disagree. Movies like The Vast of Night (2019), The Artifice Girl (2022), Happyend (2025), or the new VOD release The Strange Dark represent science fiction’s ability to imagine something small but paradigm shifting whilst effectively mining it for its dramatic potential.  

Debuting Writer and Director Chris Messineo’s movie is a chamber piece about unwelcome visitors trying to pry information stolen and deleted from a major insidious organisation, one side acts and dresses like a Hallmark movie cast, the other like the unscrupulous agents sent to retrieve it at any cost. Edgar (Caleb Scott) is Susan’s (Nili Bassman) ex-husband. He arrives talking of a great discovery made at his work— one that allows him to effectively see the future.

By staring into the void — with the right education — the void stared back; decoding that information with high-level math granted him the ability to close his eyes and see random snapshots of the future. I’ll spare you the technical details, but this is the discovery that makes him a target especially when Edgar deleted the data that led to this discovery before vanishing into the night. Despite announcing this ability, he is caught by surprise when two dangerous employees arrive at the house with questions, prepared to do anything for the answers they want. In the movie’s only major misstep, the interrogation is broken into sections, each with its own intertitle. While the escalating emotional torment and physical violence progresses from segment to segment, this presentation ultimately distances the viewer by imposing a storytelling artifice that isn’t inherent at any other point of the script. 

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The Strange Dark subverts a core expectation of its genre from the outset: tone. In a Hollywood thriller, its leads would exude a certain cool elan. In Messineo’s hands, they do not. Here we have a middle-of-the-road couple from ‘Nowhereville, America,’ both draped in knitwear—the epitome of white-picket-fence normalcy. This is the film’s first, mild but pointed, subversion of genre characterisation. An approach to characterisation that runs throughout. The same level of cutesy is also present in the antagonists too. The ring leader of the company is Maria (Carmen Borla), a diminutive Latina with a decidedly vicious streak to her. Joining her is the muscle, Frank (Bates Wilder). While he can knock a man out cold and isn’t afraid to, he’s also touchy about his age and constantly tries to deflate the tension Maria’s insidious techniques create. Other players do turn up, but for the most part we are stuck with these four characters, an ensemble whose cozy, benign energy wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark Christmas movie. You know the sort, they are on every christmas and feature a burned out woman working hard in the big city returning to her hometown to find love in the form of the impossibly hunky blueberry farmer. Crossing that vibe with a story of corporate espionage, black ops, and brutal pragmatism makes for an oddly satisfying genre collision.

This all brings me back to the Twilight Zone. There’s a charm to Messineo’s direction and writing that I can’t deny, he gets an awful lot of his cast in a project that is an actor’s dream. Opting to contain it within one house too will undoubtedly have kept production costs down, meaning it never exposes its meagre limitations. It’s a hard movie to dislike, but there’s a disappointment that there isn’t more to The Strange Dark.. This hits very close when considering that a story like this may have been used in a Twilight Zone style vehicle. We have machiavellian businesses, violence, a wacky sci-fi gun that you’d expect to see in a series like Solar Opposites, and foresight achieved through maths.  These are big ideas, yet they play out in a single room through conversation. 

This is the classic critique — and praise — of so many Twilight Zone episodes: a premise so compelling you can’t help but imagine the larger story it hints at. And yes, it is satisfying, ending with its Ned Flanders–coded protagonist dropping a killer one-liner. But the best—and worst—thing you can say about Messineo’s The Strange Dark is that it leaves you clamouring for more. Not every sci‑fi story needs to drop its pants for spectacle, but a bolder glimpse beyond the single room could make all the difference for this brand of small, ambitious, idea-led cinema.

Rob’s Archive – The Strange Dark