The most important thing I can probably say about Darling, I said to my wife a few minutes ago. “Oh no,” I said, “I forgot to finish my movie [that I was watching yesterday]. …wait. No, I did finish it.”

So anyway, there’s the 20-something house caretaker lady adjacent to what I think was a New York skyline, and she’s told by the person hiring her that it’s “the oldest house in the city, rumors of hauntings, last caretaker young lady jumped off the roof, haha, I shouldn’t be telling you this.” But no worries, she stays anyway. And the house is appropriately spooky and noisy at night, with lots of loud, 1-5 frame cutaways from her trying to sleep to disturbing close-up faces under blaring random noises.

Later, a businessman on the street returns to her an upside-down cross on a necklace that she found in a drawer and then left in the drawer, because she had just dropped it[1]. Also, there’s a narrow door at the end of an implausibly equally narrow hallway that she cannot open.  And the drain in the shower looks dissolved away by acid, more of a portal to the unknown than a proper drain. And then stuff starts getting weird.

And you know what? I should be there for all of this! Well, except the random loudness. I think the single most annoying thing was the “look what I learned in art film school!” moment when she was [spoiler removed] with a hacksaw, and the underlying sounds were street construction equipment instead of what that would actually have sounded like. But I digress.

My problem here is, there’s no payoff. Was she slowly going crazy because she’s imbalanced, or because the house? Did almost anything that happened actually happen, or was it all because she was slowly going crazy? Was the creepy room at the end of the legitimately creepy hallway[2] a real thing, or just some room with a stuck door? They’re calling it a paranoid freakout, and, I guess it was that. I just don’t know what character(s) my sympathies should lie with, or really, frankly, almost any aspect of what happened. You would think a 78 minute movie would not manage to be too long, and yet here we are.

Oh well, can’t win ’em all.

[1] That is, she shouldn’t have been able to drop it on the street because she returned it to the drawer. Get it? Spooky!
[2] Seriously though. 10-15 foot white hallway, culminating in a door maybe 1.5 thin people wide, and the hallway is exactly the same width as the door, with no other doors along the sides, and only a sharp corner to the rest of the house at the entrance end of the hallway. I think that creepy, creepy, “probably they built it for the movie because who would ever have that creepy of a hallway?” hallway was at least two thirds of the film’s appeal for me[3].
[3] I mean, even before I decided I didn’t like the movie in the first place; the 2/3 comment is supposed to highlight how effectively creepy it was as a visual, not how little i liked the rest of the movie. (It’s more like 95% of the appeal after the fact.)