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Dark Days – review Dark Days – review
(3 months later)
Marc Singer's 2000 documentary Dark Days has been rereleased, and it still has the power to shock and to deject. Those certainly were its effects on me when I saw the film on its first UK showing 13 years ago.Marc Singer's 2000 documentary Dark Days has been rereleased, and it still has the power to shock and to deject. Those certainly were its effects on me when I saw the film on its first UK showing 13 years ago.
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Singer's subject is the community of lost souls living in the underground tunnels beneath Penn Station, in New York. They have erected plasterboard partitions, and ingeniously managed to reroute electricity to their homemade shacks, though there is no running water. They can be very houseproud. It is safer down in their subterranean shantytown than being homeless on ground level, but for me a second viewing disclosed even more clearly the un-bohemian horror of actually existing down there, having almost literally fallen through the cracks. In the darkness, their faces loom like lost souls in purgatory: in daylight, they look quite different and more human. I would love to see a kind of 14-Up sequel: what's happened to these people in the interim? A tough, compassionate movie.Singer's subject is the community of lost souls living in the underground tunnels beneath Penn Station, in New York. They have erected plasterboard partitions, and ingeniously managed to reroute electricity to their homemade shacks, though there is no running water. They can be very houseproud. It is safer down in their subterranean shantytown than being homeless on ground level, but for me a second viewing disclosed even more clearly the un-bohemian horror of actually existing down there, having almost literally fallen through the cracks. In the darkness, their faces loom like lost souls in purgatory: in daylight, they look quite different and more human. I would love to see a kind of 14-Up sequel: what's happened to these people in the interim? A tough, compassionate movie.