“Out of Darkness” starts out with a tale told around a campfire, and its characters may or may not know they’re living in one, traversing unsettled land 45,000 years ago. Awaiting the birth of child in their party, with its leader Adem (Chuku Modu) hoping that his partner Ave (Iola Evans) will deliver a boy to them, Odal (Arno Lüning) is obliged to do his own part to keep the collective cozy as the fire in front of them with a story that will keep spirits high amidst a grueling trek, imagining the bounty of animals to hunt and warm caves on the other side of the sea. The group is all entertained, but the levels of enjoyment each can take expose the underlying tensions in it when Adem’s son Heron (Luna Mwezi) by another mother is seen taking inspiration in the tale while Ave and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), another young woman in the group, are more skeptical of the stories being told, continuing myths that have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies if they aren’t disrupted.
Andrew Cumming’s riveting debut feels like a welcome disruption itself amidst modern cinema, taking audiences back to the Stone Age where any self-crafted technology to survive may not have been all that sophisticated, but relationships were no less complex, yielding a thriller where as dangerous as the wildlife around could be for humans looking to set up a home, they could be just as easily responsible for their own demise due to infighting. As poor as communication may get amongst the group when Adem insists his is the only way forward and his plans inevitably go awry, Cumming and screenwriter Ruth Greenberg crisply articulate the threats to the group, going so far as to invent their own language in accordance with the type of dialect that might’ve been used at the time, and pull on other era-specific details to carve out a unique backdrop for a taut thriller.
Filmed far from civilization in the Scottish Highlands just as the world was emerging from the COVID lockdown, the film is assured while channeling a palpable sense of anxiety throughout about how an equitable society will take shape and the dawn of a new day becomes exciting when it also involves the introduction of a bold new filmmaker in Cumming. Recently, he took the time to talk about how he set out on the seemingly impossible task of bringing such an unusual film to the screen, the work that went into staying true to an era where little could be documented and working with the cast in a language that none of them could know before filming.
How does something like this even start to take root?
After film school, I just got really obsessed with this time period. I saw a documentary on the BBC, and then I read books by William Golding called “The Inheritors” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” about the history of humankind and I just thought this is such a cool space to talk about us as a species, and then Oliver Kastman, the producer, also was thinking about the same time period. He had the idea about a horror movie [set then], and I thought, horror is such a great way to slip the vitamins in with the ice cream, so we set off on that journey together. Ruth Greenberg, the writer, joined us and that was it.
What was it like to actually dig into this period to develop a story?
You do as much research as you can so that there’s a level of authenticity and then you have to remind your heads of department, we are making a movie, so [you] take this stuff and do some blue sky thinking around it. Our paleontologists have dug up sewing needles made of bone, which would suggest that we were tailoring our clothes and using animal sinew, for example, as a thread and making clothing, so that gave Michael O’Connor, a costume designer, great license to design clothing that was more fitted. The other thing I didn’t want was for these people to look unsophisticated or to look like they didn’t spend time thinking about their attire in these conditions, so that was really useful. Then Jamie Lapsley, our production designer, and our team did a real deep dive into various digs around Europe, so little things like the bone disk that works almost like a flip book, these are all things that we know were made [at the time], and it just adds this level of authenticity, but also makes the characters more rounded. It makes them feel like believable people instead of waxworks in a museum.
I know those kind of ideas extended into the score as well. What was it like to put music onto this?
Yeah, Adam [Janota Bzowski] had previously scored “Saint Maud,” [which] I loved and his score was terrific. So I met him and said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do, but what I would suggest is research instruments from that period and find out what they could have used,” and then Adam just took that kernel of an idea and ran with it. At one point. [he] was recording sounds from an Australian specialist with a lithophone, like stone percussion, so there’s kudu horns in there and conch shells, just trying to find anything from the natural world that would have believably been used in that time period, and then putting them through crazy filters and various electronic processes to just make it sound both past but also future, so there’s something very contemporary about it as well.
It looked like the environment was really inspiring as well. Were the Highlands in mind?
Yeah, I’ve been up the Northwest of Scotland a lot of times, both with work and just personally, so I knew that everything we needed was in that area. And certainly before Ruth wrote a page of the script, she, myself, and Oliver went up and did a recce in that part of the world for a few days and there’s actually things that happened to us on that recce that are in the script. For example, we almost got lost in this really thick fog up a mountain. So Ruth transplanted that situation into the script for a certain section, and on any given day with any certain weather environment, it dictates how you shoot and the energy on set, so part of Scotland is in the entire DNA of the movie. It’s inescapable.
The visual language of this is so precise as well, in terms of when the camera is still versus when it moves. What was that like to work out, particularly with the conditions you may have had?
Yeah, certainly there are times that we go handheld where I didn’t want to go handheld, but either the light was fading or the ground was too marshy to get a slider or a dolly track in. So it was just a case of saying, “We’re against the clock and we can’t do this any other way, let’s go handheld.” And actually sometimes those were the most freeing scenes because it meant the actors were just less encumbered by marks, and our poor focus puller just had to keep up, right, and he did a fantastic job of it. And there were other places where the ground was too uneven or equipment would start to sink into a peat bog, but you cut your cloth accordingly. For the most part, I I wanted the first third of the movie to be quite still and just present these people and get into the bloodstream of the movie and then at the end of the first act, then the camera can move more with these people and it was trying to make the character almost the seventh member of the tribe.
When you had to invent a language for this, what was that like to develop communication amongst the cast?
Yeah, the very first version of the script was in English and it was only after we commissioned Daniel Anderson, who’s a contact of the producer — or challenged him, I should say, to come up with the language, so in final draft, you have the dual dialogue function. The English was down one side, and Tola, that’s what we called the language, was down the other. And everybody committed. Daniel did a really great job of making something that felt really believable and lived in, and it just rolled off the tongue and at no point did any of us think, “Well, this sounds stupid.” I also think the cast just loved being out of their own skin and it was just another level of realism to help them invest in what they were doing every day. So many times as a director, you get caught up in the language and in the minutia of pronunciation, so it was really great to be freed from that and just watch the monitor and ask myself, “Do I believe it?” And if I believe it, then I can move on and get the next shot. So it was actually a bonus creatively to be able to do it.
Was there anything that happened that you may not have anticipated but came to embrace or get excited about?
Towards the end of the movie, there’s a scene between Beyah [played by Safia Oakley-Green] and Heron, the small boy [played by Luna Mwezi], where Heron is admonishing Beyah for her behavior and saying, “Why did you do this?” And the scene was a certain way in my head, and we were losing the light, and I had to get these two young actors to a certain point physically and emotionally, so we ran this scene six or seven times, and I kept saying, “I’m not going to give you a note. Just go again.” Because they needed to get to such a patch of emotion and you weren’t going to get it on take one or take two. Their voices had to be hoarse. They needed to look drained and their heart rate needed to be up, so we just had to keep doing it. And because we were handheld for that scene, Safia and Luna jus just locked into this performance on take seven or eight, and actually my editor, Paolo [Pandolpho] showed me the cut and he said, “I’ve just used this one shot I haven’t broken because Ben’s camera work and the performances are so good. It just is far more intense than if we cut and lose that tension.”
That’s one of those great moments where the lens was as wide open as we could go and we were 10 minutes from having to wrap and you just get this [feeling], the whole movie is encapsulated in this scene and it far exceeded my expectations. I remember turning to Oliver and the monitor and going, “Wow, if this was film, I’d be saying, ‘print it.’” That’s just the conditioning of being on set every day and shooting in almost chronological order. Everybody is just living and breathing this thing and it’s in your bloodstream.
You can tell from the final result and even when any movie seems difficult to get off the ground, this seems like a particularly heavy lift. What’s it like to have out in the world?
I feel really elated. Obviously, it’s been a large portion of my adult life, thinking about conceiving and then delivering this baby, so it feels nice to finally see it take its first steps. [laughs] And when you make your debut, you’ve been an outsider for so long. I always wanted to be a filmmaker and all you want is people to pay for a ticket to go and see a movie. That’s it. So now to get that opportunity and see what people think of it, good or bad, I don’t care at this point. I’m just so thrilled that all the hard work and sacrifices that I’ve made — and that everyone on the team made — have paid off. And I feel like films last and they matter, so you should make them like they’re carved in granite because they’ll last forever.
“Out of Darkness” opens wide on February 9th.