“Silence.
Darkness.” Those two words appear up front in most of Neil Labute’s stageplays, though his latest feature, “House of Darkness,” opens with a more playful “Once Upon a Time …” The film — Labute’s first in a bumpy seven-year stretch since “Dirty Weekend,” during which the provocateur was abruptly dropped by longtime Off Broadway partner McC Theater — starts out as a standard hookup scenario and twists into edgier, potentially supernatural “Promising Young Woman” territory.
Part cautionary tale, part post-#MeToo ghost story, this sly chamber piece uses silence and darkness to its advantage, allowing audiences’ imaginations to fill in the spaces and shadows of an atypical one-night stand.It’s pretty clear what Hap Jackson (Justin Long) is hoping will follow when he offers Mina Murray a ride home from the local bar.
Guys like Hap refer to nights like this as “getting lucky,” though he’s almost certain
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