Brave the Dark: Hurawatch

Brave the Dark: Hurawatch

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The lines of “Brave the Dark” seemed like movies my father noted were a good watch because “You didn’t need to overthink [them].” While watching the flick as a kid, I was captivated by the heavy-handed teacher movies produced in the 1980s. There was your “Deads Poet Society”, “Misters Holland’s Opus,” and even “Goods Will Hunting” to name a few. Even if Angel Studios, a Christian movie studio, does not target their evangelical audience with the more bittersweet works such as those described above they still manage to grasp some form of complexity within the movie, even if tackling something more evocative than the studio’s usual work would be ideal. The essential components of the movie do function, although the film stands on the verge of dousing the viewer in overly sugary, sentimentality.

“Brave the Dark” relates a true story that is co-written by its subject Nathan Deen. It details the unfolding story of a gentle Pennsylvania high school teacher Stan Deen (Damien’s brother Jared Harris, skillfully caricaturing a Midwestern accent) and a troubled teenager Nate (“IT’s” Nicholas Hamilton), a strikingly good looking but deeply troubled orphan who conceals the car where he lives from his peers. For the sake of free showers, he runs track and field, dons a leather jacket and frequents the wrong company. This privileges him to showers, but makes him a target; in due course, he gets arrested for breaking and entering, and jailed all by himself. Deen, worried about the kid, contacts Nate's grandparents who turn out to be frosty, indifferent to the boy, viewing him merely as a burden emblematic of an unvoiced tragedy that swirled around his late mother. Stan decides to take him in, so instead of removing him from school, he chooses to mentor him while setting conditions for graduation.

Nate’s adolescence seems to have been plagued with tragedy. Most seem to revolve around a blood-splattered child who is being cleaned, a terrified mother standing above a bridge, along with several others. These haunting memories flash by during the growth of his relationship with Stan, who grimly loses his mother. A supportive environment allows Nate to flourish. As is expected of these films, the bond between the teacher and student is profoundly transformational, healing for both teacher and child. As the credits roll, hope effortlessly mingles with despair. “Brave the Dark” does very little to diverge from formula. The film lays out all the emotional cues of a Hallmark film, and indeed, ceaseless sob fests. It has zero surprises, but the melodramatic score and presentation guarantee endless tears. Apart from plot concerns, the cinematography is where the film budget becomes painfully evident. A shoddy looking, dodgy green screen alongside awkwardly color graded flashback scenes are scattered throughout. Harris's directing and blocking is deceptively distant and timid.

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Like always, Harris bestows his characters with a weary conviction, and that helps Stan feel more nuanced than the scripts tries to confine him to within the bounds of a feel-good Ned Flanders caricature. Simply put, he is a saint, the type of pot-bellied, nice gentlemen who appears to have been placed on earth for the sole purpose of epitomizing the self-effacing virtue young people should want to emulate. Indeed, we would be better off as a society if there were more Stans populating the earth. Whatever charm is left in the movie comes from Harris’ blushing shrugs and wry smiles – the creaky dad jokes delivered with the relish of a fun uncle at Thanksgiving that make him seem truly merry at simply being able to take part in the action instead of having to write the script.

Regarding Hamilton, he makes the most out of the situation he is in, which is being a glamorized version of James Dean, whose main transgressions include slouching, skipping class, and sulking. (Oh, and mingling with a gang of ne’er do wells who smoke, can you believe that?) While they do not have strong artistic chemistry together, both do carry their weight in their respective scenes reasonably well. (One prominent example is the almost self-destructive “High School Musical” style featured in the painting-the-stag for Stan’s play where solo Nate dances during his ‘prep’.)

Brave the Dark feels like a shift in strategy by Angel Studios that pivots away from the extreme right-wing inspiration of QAnon-style works like “Sound of Freedom” to something more family-friendly and softer, much like their previous release “Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot.” These based-on-true-story depictions of largely unseen kindness, while difficult to critique, are hard to reconcile with the fact that the studio has unashamedly built its reputation on an ideological foundation tailored to an evangelical audience.

Yet "Brave the Dark" does not fall prey to that type of preaching: During the flashback scenes, a cross is visible in the car and Harris' Deen takes a few moments to not really pray at the film's most disheartening scenes. That is all. The film remains focused on depicting a real-life Good Samaritan, and a genuine one at that. Angel Studios also has a mission statement where they aim to release films that 'amplify light.' If they stick to simplistic stories like these, they might just win me over.