Film Difficulty 4

Dark Skull Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Dark Skull isn’t your typical character driven drama. The dark environment of the Huanuni mines and Bolivian city streets are a long way away from familiar landscapes. Pretty much the entire film is set in darkness, either during the nighttime above ground, or underground during the daytime. Day starts to blend into night, and scenes above ground start to dissolve into the scenes below ground as both are shrouded in darkness. We journey into the subterranean with Elder as his mind is consumed by the abyss. Is he in control, or is the environment driving him mad?

From: Bolivia, South America
Watch: Trailer, Vimeo
Next: A Touch of Sin, Tony Manero, El Dorado XXI

The Breakdown

We’re introduced to Elder in a vice filled opening. We see him chase after a woman and rob her, before retreating down a dark alley to drink and smoke. He looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, lurking in the shadows whilst he fondles a crack pipe in his hands. Next he’s in a hectic night club, before he’s being chased along the street by a group of men. The opening establishes Elder’s depraved existence in the shadows of an anonymous Bolivian city.

From there, Dark Skull cuts to a nighttime search party of men and women lighting up the hills and canyons of rural Bolivia with flashlights. The juxtaposition between the noisy built up urban environment in which Elder resides, and the silent, empty rural environment is noticeable. Perhaps Dark Skull isn’t following a linear narrative.

The search party finds what they’re looking for in the dead body of Elder’s dad, slumped on the ground behind a shrub. The group starts preparing his burial as Elder is recalled from the city. He’s been ordered home to live with his lone grandmother and assume his dead father’s job in the mines.

No one asks him whether he wants to work in the mines. Down inside the earth, he tells his new colleagues that the job is only temporary and he will be moving on. However, after seeing him struggling to get by in the opening, it doesn’t look like he has anything to escape to. For the foreseeable future, it looks like he’ll be spending his days under the same ground his father is buried in. It’s not an environment he’s accustomed to.

In the first day or two underground, director Kiro Russo immerses us in the harsh, claustrophobic underground tunnels of the mining complex. Firstly, the noise of the machines is so overbearing that the director dissolves a shot of Elder’s face into a montage of close ups of machinery. It’s as if Elder’s becoming part of the machine. With it, he’s losing his personality to the collective workforce, much like the machinery montages you might have seen in early Soviet film. Secondly, it’s dark. The only light comes from the head torches and flash lights the miners carry. Everywhere else is a dark indistinguishable abyss.

Overwhelmed by the machinery, Elder ventures out into the abyss on his own to take a break. As he wanders, Russo starts rotating the camera vertically as well as horizontally to further disorientate us as Elder gets lost. Alone in the darkness, the scenes reminded me of the Nietzsche quote: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. Elder has ventured into the abyss, and the abyss has consumed him. His life and freedom has been vanquished, and he’s now stuck toiling in his father’s life until he joins him permanently underground. With nothing to strive for and his own ego being dissolved, he drinks and smokes to escape thinking about his fate. He makes petty acts of resistance, like pissing on his colleagues bags and feigning injury, to throw up a middle finger to his fate.

But you could also view Dark Skull as a story of one man’s degeneration from working in the mines. Later in the film, Elder is pictured in the same nightclub as in the opening. It’s not clear if he’s revisiting the club, is imagining it, or he’s stuck in a cycle. Perhaps the opening scenes are a flash forward to an Elder already messed up from working in the mines. Seen this way, Dark Skull becomes film about the degradation of one man forced to work in an oppressive mine instead of the story of a drunkard without ambition.

What to Watch Next

Kiro Russo draws on a wide range of influences to make Dark Skull. Most noticeably, Dark Skull feels and looks like Chinese Noir, such as the dark underworld of The Wild Goose Lake and the depraved characters and hopelessness in A Touch of Sin. (Speaking of depraved characters and hopelessness, you could also watch Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero and/or Post Mortem).

Dark Skull also references early Soviet film techniques that you see in its montages and disorientating dissolve cuts of Man With A Movie Camera. Albeit in this case, the techniques are used to create hopeless confusion, instead of excitement for modernity.

Or, for more mining in darkness in rural South America, check out Peru’s slow film El Dorado XXI, featuring another mine isolated in an incredibly harsh environment.