Watch The Passion of Darkly Noon For Free

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is rare to chance on the first few films of a Hollywood actor obviously destined for better stuff and this is no exception. This is Brendan Fraser post California/Encino man and pre-Mummy etc in a sexy movie about passions bubbling under the surface. Fraser plays the Darkly Noon of the title who is found by a labourer and taken to his friends, Caly and Clay who reside in the forest. For the first 30 minutes plus of the film, only Caly is present, a beautiful and at times teasing presence in the film from Noon's perspective. Extremely religious Noon has difficulty reconciling Caly and his feelings for her until her lover, Clay returns and, troubled by their love for each other and the teachings of his parents and other strangers in the woods, Noon fights, literally against his rescuers quite spectacularly.

This is an unusual film. The summary above does a fair description of the plot, but what it doesn't describe is the air of magic around the forest and everyone's encounters within it. It's hard to describe this, except to say that the film both brings you together with one character's descent into madness while also introducing you to people who seem as though they stepped right out of a story book.At times, it has the feel of some children's tale of a lost soul wandering through the woods, encountering various odd characters. Some are endearing, some are frightening. The difference is that this isn't a children's tale, and the emotions and imperatives are being experienced by adults, though not always with a mature sense of self-control.Ashley Judd is both eerily wistful and intensely sensuous as a young lady seemingly without any concept of shame or self consciousness, and deeply in love. Brendan Fraser does a credible job of portraying an inexperienced, painfully conflicted child-man and seems to sweat this tension from every pore.

'The passion of Darkly Noon' is probably one of the worst movies I have ever watched. The reason why I stayed with it till the end was that I was curious how many more unreasonable, incoherent and irrelevant features were about to appear. This is not discrediting the actors, I leave that open, but only about the storyline.The plot is very simple and easy to guess after the first few minutes but then the movie keeps changing subject and focus. First, it is obviously the issue of Noon and Callie and that she is his first love after being brought up in a very isolated context. Then the movie shifts to the story between Callie and Roxy suggesting to become more of a mysterious thriller about witchcraft, but this is just a fake and does not go far. The appearance of Noon's parents adds to the issue but seemed to me completely ridiculous, furthered by the awful acting of both of them (and who did that make-up?). Towards the end the movie goes into longer and longer scenes. The climax (from the point where Noon starts painting himself in the cave until he is killed) could have been just as well expressed in half the time, the scenes drag on for ages. few more things. First, the undertaker. Who wrote this character into the movie? He is a joke and does not fit at all with the overall pace and depth the movie desperately but unsuccessfully tries to establish. His little helper (who finds Darkly Noon in the first place) speaks of Darkly as his friend, although they have only seen each other once or twice. The friendship was probably so emphasized in order to make the final shooting scene a hard decision for that guy (seeing that he has to kill his 'friend'). But the conflict does not appear at all in that scene (he quickly shoots Darkly and that's it).Last thing. What is the silver shoe all about? Was that to include some symbolic feature? Anything would have been more believable than a giant silver shoe floating down a river because a circus-family had an accident loosing that shoe on that river. How come the shoe floats past Darkly but is later used as a burning stake for Roxy's dog (would you incinerate your dog on a silver shoe? was it completely normal for Roxy to find a giant silver shoe? shouldn't the shoe have been much further downstream by the point it is used?). The circus family, who appears randomly in the last scene of the movie, did not only have one giant silver shoe, no, they also had a miniature model of it (which the son's 'favourite toy'). First of all, who believes that!? Second, his son's 'favourite toy'? Any stick is a better toy than a silver shoe (which will always remain a silver shoe, any wooden stick would be more interesting (because it would trigger the imagination) than an abstract silver shoe. By the way, Callie never saw the silver shoe before, so when it is presented to her it cannot have any meaning to her (and how helpful is a silver shoe after your house burned down!?)These were my major concern, rendering this movie completely ridiculous and horribly written.

Ahh, Christ! I am so sick of movies like these. You know the type, filled with lots of symbolism that fails to symbolize anything other than the director being more concerned for his reputation as an "artist," than the audience understanding his message or feeling engaged by the story. Some of this symbolism goes to theextremes of being laughable, such as, (PERHAPS A MINOR SPOILER, but idoubt it) a giant, mirrored shoe floating down the river. What's truly worse is this had the potential of being a very interesting drama, as Darkly Noon, a manchild raised in a religiously fanatical household wrestleswith his attraction to married woman, is ruined by the writer/director's self- indulgence. He feels the need to throw lots of shallow ideas at us, hoping we will find him brilliant and ignore that he does not even seem to know what he is trying to say or even how to tell the story. What truly makes me upset is that this is the type of movie brainwashed art- house whores are willing to gravel over self-righteously. They are willing to stand in line like sheep and sing the praises of a movie they don't understand, going on and on about how it goes against the "Evil Hollywood System," thenew catch-all category for everyone who feels like complaining; this complaint has become the equivalent of film-school rejects who do poor work, turn it in late, and when they are given their deservingly terrible grade, scream and holler they are not being understood for the "true artist they really are." That everyone else is just "unsophisticated." Well, Hollywood may give us lots of garbage, but at least they don't wrap their trash in boring, pretensious stabs at meaningdesigned less for thinking audiences and more for self-obsessed "intellectuals," whom like to show off how smart they think they are. If you want a film thatcreates a thoroughly engaging, entertaining, and meaningful drama throughuse of surreal imagery try Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy. Normally, i'm not this mean to a film, but when i get slapped in the face, i feel abliged to return the favor.