“Till Death Do Us Boredom Apart”
If I Will Follow You Into the Dark (later renamed Into the Dark, presumably to save audiences from following the wrong movie) teaches us anything, it’s that not every song lyric should be turned into a film. Inspired by the emotional intimacy of the Death Cab for Cutie ballad, writer-director Mark Edwin Robinson apparently took the title literally and decided to create 90 minutes of emotional and cinematic darkness.
The result? A movie so dreary and confused that even the ghosts look like they regret showing up.
It’s billed as a supernatural romance—Ghost meets The Notebook by way of a particularly bleak indie—but what we get instead is Flatliners on Ambien.
Meet Sophia: The Patron Saint of Pacing Problems
Mischa Barton stars as Sophia Monet, a young woman whose parents have recently died, leaving her alone, depressed, and apparently without access to a decent therapist or a functioning lightbulb.
Sophia spends the first half of the movie wandering around her apartment in soft lighting, sighing heavily, and staring at her reflection like she’s auditioning for a perfume commercial directed by Edgar Allan Poe.
We’re told she doesn’t believe in the afterlife, which makes sense, since nothing in this movie has any life to begin with.
Then she meets Adam (Ryan Eggold), a brooding photographer who looks like he stepped out of an Urban Outfitters catalog and into a ghost story by mistake. They meet, flirt awkwardly, and suddenly—because time is meaningless in this film—they’re in love.
Their chemistry is so tepid that you half expect a “Do Not Disturb” sign to hang itself in protest.
The Romance: Ghosting, in Every Sense
The relationship between Sophia and Adam is supposed to anchor the film emotionally, but it’s about as stable as a Ouija board on a trampoline. Their conversations sound like they were written by someone who’s never spoken to another human being but has seen people flirt on basic cable.
At one point, Adam tells Sophia that “everything happens for a reason,” to which she replies with the passion of someone ordering salad: “Maybe.”
If that doesn’t make your heart race, don’t worry—nothing else will either.
Before we can even get invested, Adam vanishes mysteriously, and Sophia decides to track him down. It’s the classic romantic quest setup—except instead of, say, love letters or detective work, her journey involves slowly walking through dimly lit hallways and whispering his name into the void.
It’s less “I will follow you into the dark” and more “I will wander aimlessly until the credits.”
The Afterlife: Now Leasing One-Bedroom Apartments
Sophia’s search leads her to an apartment building that looks like Hell’s waiting room designed on a student loan budget. The atmosphere is meant to be eerie, but the production design screams “we found this building condemned and filmed there anyway.”
The elevator doesn’t work, the walls drip with menace (and probably lead paint), and every door seems to lead to another metaphor for regret.
This is supposedly the boundary between the living and the dead, but it’s hard to tell—mostly because the lighting is so dark that you could hide an entire other film crew in the shadows.
Sophia meets a few vague supporting characters who drift in and out of the story like unpaid interns: a friendly neighbor, a weird psychic, a cop who looks permanently confused. None of them add much except more exposition, which this movie treats like holy scripture.
By the time Sophia realizes she’s literally crossing into the realm of the dead, the audience has already crossed into the realm of apathy.
Mischa Barton vs. The Void (and the Script)
To Barton’s credit, she tries. She really does. You can see the effort behind her eyes—the same look people have when they realize their GPS has led them into a swamp.
Her performance oscillates between “mournful whisper” and “confused stare,” which, to be fair, fits the tone of the film. It’s just hard to feel anything when your protagonist seems as exhausted by the story as you are.
Ryan Eggold, meanwhile, has the charisma of a screensaver. He plays Adam with such gentle detachment that you start to wonder if he’s been dead the whole movie—or just his career aspirations.
Their love story feels less like destiny and more like two people trapped in an elevator making small talk until rescue arrives.
The Ghosts: Now You See Them, Now You’re Still Bored
Supernatural horror thrives on tension, atmosphere, and dread. Into the Dark has none of these things. Instead, it has long silences, bad lighting, and the occasional sound effect that feels like it wandered in from a YouTube “Haunted House Ambience” video.
When the ghosts do appear, they’re about as frightening as an unfluffed pillow. The scares rely on flickering lights, creaky noises, and editing so slow it could be legally classified as a nap.
One scene involves Sophia hearing whispers and following them through the apartment building, only for the camera to cut to… nothing. Just Sophia breathing heavily while the soundtrack does its best boo impression.
By the time the actual supernatural twist arrives—something about souls crossing dimensions, love surviving death, and metaphysical elevators—you’ve stopped caring about logic. You just want someone, anyone, to turn on a lamp.
The Tone: Moody, Mournful, and Mostly Motionless
The film desperately wants to be poetic. You can feel Robinson reaching for spiritual profundity—pondering death, grief, and the meaning of love beyond mortality.
But instead of profound, it comes off as pretentious. Every shot lingers too long, every line tries too hard, and every scene feels like it’s trying to win a film school thesis competition.
You half-expect the end credits to thank Nietzsche and a bottle of Xanax.
The pacing doesn’t help. This movie moves slower than a ghost stuck in traffic. There’s no tension, no urgency, just long, ponderous shots of Barton gazing into the abyss like she’s waiting for it to text back.
The Music: Death Cab, Disappointment, and Dissonance
With a title inspired by Death Cab for Cutie, you might expect a soundtrack filled with indie melancholy. Instead, the score sounds like someone took a half-charged keyboard and started mashing the “sad piano” key while sobbing softly into a cup of tea.
It’s haunting, yes—but only because it reminds you of that time your computer froze during a Spotify playlist.
The Ending: Finally, Mercy
When Sophia finally crosses over to find Adam, it’s supposed to be a bittersweet revelation—love transcending death, a cosmic reunion. Instead, it plays like two lost souls trapped in a perfume ad called “Melancholia.”
The ending offers no catharsis, just more fog, more staring, and a voiceover that seems to apologize for the movie without meaning to.
The audience doesn’t so much reach closure as they do Stockholm Syndrome: grateful that it’s over, but still haunted by the experience.
Final Thoughts: The Real Horror Is the Runtime
Into the Dark tries to be a meditation on love, loss, and the afterlife, but it ends up being an unintentional parody of indie horror. It’s moody without meaning, spiritual without substance, and romantic without chemistry.
It’s a film where nothing happens for so long that by the time something does happen, you’re not sure if it’s a plot twist or just your brain hallucinating to stay awake.
Rating
1.5 out of 5 Ghostly Eye Rolls.
Mischa Barton deserves better. The audience deserves better. Even the ghosts deserve better.
If you’re looking for a haunting meditation on love and mortality, watch Ghost. If you’re looking for a reason to nap with ambient background noise, Into the Dark is your movie.
After all, sometimes the scariest thing isn’t the afterlife—it’s realizing you paid to see this one.
