The Dark Gets In world première at Beyond Fest, 2 Oct 2026
“When either an individual or a community has gone through some sort of pain or trauma, they will instinctively reach for the superstition to make sense of that which they’re going through,” says the academic folklorist Dr Evan Westfall (James Swanton) towards the end of The Dark Gets In. “What if the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose?”
These words encapsulate the preoccupations of writer/director Sean Hogan’s latest film, which takes a single middle-class family’s crisis as a microcosm for more global anxieties, and offers a disorienting weave of fact and fiction. The film’s very format – a faux documentary comprising reportage, authoritative text, talking-heads interviews, integrated found footage and other features familiar from ‘true crime’ televison – queers the difference between reality and its mediated mythologisation.
After 15-going-on-16-year-old Aisling Sullivan (Kezia Cotterrell) disappears from her bedroom one night, her mother Natasha (Charlotte Pyke), father Rory (Cameron Lewis) and teen brother Owen (Scott Burchell) must sort through their denial, delusion, anger and grief to come to terms with what has happened – if not quite to understand it. For the house was double-locked from the inside, there were no signs of forced entry or violence, and only the most shadowy sign of any intruder has been captured on CCTV from the many cameras set about the place. Worst of all, there is no body, nor even any trace, of Aisling, leaving a void into which paranoia and fantasy easily take up residence.
While rationalist Rory invests hope in the investigation of D.I. George Sweet (Russell Barnett) for resolution, desperate Natasha, already unbalanced by the similarity of her daughter’s disappearance to the abduction and murder, decades earlier, of Natasha’s school friend Millie (Kelly White), turns to Laila Merryweather (Julie Boyle), “the second-best medium in the whole of Bradford”, and becomes convinced that Aisling is still around and reaching out. Yet as video diaries emerge showing that Aisling, like Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer before her, was leading a double life, flirting with danger and inviting darkness in – all unbeknownst to her parents although known to her best friend Samena Bellamy (Farah Ashraf). In her strange and sexualised secret videos, Aisling adopted the name and guise of Lewis Carroll’s little girl lost Alice – which is also the forename of the absent girl in Joel Anderson’s similarly mournful mockumentary Lake Mungo (2008).
In the interests of objectivity, or perhaps, as Rory puts it, of “making a fucking mockery of this [and] just trying to sell a tv show”, the documentary crew present in parallel both narrative frames – the one banally rational and sceptical of anything otherworldly, the other more sensationalist and supernatural – even as these clashing viewpoints divide the Sullivans and drive them from their comfortable domestic space. When both Owen, initially reluctant to participate in the documentary, and Samena come forward with their own phone video evidence, the viewer too is drawn into this peculiar confabulaton of modern tragedy and ancient evil, or what child psychologist Dr Alana Aickman (Nicki Hobday) describes as “old dangers that are taking new forms.”
That also describes what Hogan is doing with The Dark Gets In, as he (expressly) takes contemporary anxieties and conspiracy theories about child trafficking, sex rings and pedophilia, and exposes them to more oldfangled tropes of horror, showcasing a long established story that is always, in its predatory fundamentals, the same, even if its modes of transmission and communication change. This is also a portrait of raw, intense loss, devouring a family from the inside – and it is told with a realist presentation and naturalistic performances that belie the more fanciful content gradually let in.
strap: Sean Hogan’s faux documentary exposes a contemporary family to immense loss and an oldfangled predator
© Anton Bitel
