The result is diverting enough, yet ends up more a mildly offbeat time-filler than something memorable.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck
But it's Scott who fully carries the film, helping us overlook the story's contrivances with his moving and intense performance as a character who is as far removed from Professor Moriarty as you can get.
Screenplays like A Dark Place only get made because they’re familiar. They present intrigue and drama in a way that doesn’t challenge the audience but reinforces their belief of what a movie like this should be. This conformist methodology might make the movie palatable—and marketable—but it doesn’t make it any good.
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
A Dark Place is earnest enough, but it comes across as phony. It’s hard to do a “local color” drama when everyone’s from out of town.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.
Donnie is a most unusual character to serve as our tour guide to “A Dark Place.” British character actor Andrew Scott (“Spectre,””Pride” and TV’s Moriarty in “Sherlock”) utterly immerses himself in this “town weirdo” character who becomes obsessed with a little boy on his route who disappears, and then is found drowned in a local creek.
It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging.
The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide
Unfortunately, Scott is the most persuasive element in a film that is atmospherically photographed by Marcel Zyskind but let down by a clueless screenplay which borders, at times, on the risible.