Dark (2017 film)

Dark is a 2017 American drama-thriller directed and written by Paul Schrader, an experimental recut of his 2014 film Dying of the Light, assembled after the producers re-edited that film without his approval. It stars Nicolas Cage as Evan Lake, a CIA agent who goes rogue to hunt the terrorist who tortured him years earlier while his own mind deteriorates from dementia.^{1 • 2}

Background: the loss of Dying of the Light

Schrader filmed the movie in 2013, and it was released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. In his own account, the film was taken from him after the first director's cut and re-edited, scored, and mixed without his input. He offered to cut and mix a new version at his own expense, but the producers denied permission.² The dispute was public: Schrader, along with stars including Nicolas Cage, protested the re-editing of the film without his permission, and on his online portfolio he replaced the film's poster with a photograph of the cast and crew wearing protest T-shirts and left the credits empty.^{6 • 7}

Making Dark

A workaround under constraint. Three years after losing the film, Schrader created Dark as what MUBI describes as a wild, unprecedented workaround to make the movie he intended all along, assembling it out of fragments ripped from the mangled theatrical cut and transforming it into a kind of post-modern collage.³ He worked outside the purview of his producers, the film's distributor (Grindhouse Entertainment/Lionsgate), copyright law, and standard practices.⁷

The material constraints shaped the result. Schrader had only work print DVDs, not the hi-res finished footage or unmixed sound, and he stated that he tried to use those limitations to his advantage, pursuing the more aggressive editing style he had been working toward when the film was taken away.² The recut runs 75 minutes, about 20 minutes shorter than the original release.⁸

Style and differences from the theatrical cut

The recut replaces the producers' approach with a subjective, fragmentary one. Reviewer Steve Morrissey describes sudden cutaways, abrupt changes in point of view, uneven color grading, a jumbled timeline, and aggressive jump cuts that convey a mind falling apart, with an echoey, off-kilter sound design. Frederik Wiedmann's insistently rhythmic original score, the clearest marker of the producers' Bourne-style thriller, was junked in favor of something more angular and ambient.⁸

The story itself is unchanged in outline: Lake tries to find his man, finds him, and has the conversation in which hunter and hunted decide they are more alike than either thought, ending far less conclusively than the theatrical version but, in that reviewer's judgment, more satisfyingly.⁸

Distribution and availability

Because Schrader held no distribution rights, Dark reached the public through unusual channels. He claimed to have uploaded a torrent of the film in 2017, and for months viewing it was otherwise limited to institutional access at UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin by prior appointment only.⁷ Schrader later wrote on Letterboxd in 2022 that he had sent a copy to the UCLA film archive, which holds the prints of his films, and that a friend had pointed out a copy was now available online at archive.org.⁹ IMDb's FAQ lists it as available on Netflix and recommends watching the producer's cut first and then the 75-minute director's recut.¹⁰

Reception

Audience ratings are modest and based on small samples: 5.9/10 from 636 users on IMDb¹ and 6.6/10 from 32 ratings on MUBI.³ Commentary has focused less on the film's polish than on its place in the production disaster surrounding Dying of the Light. Morrissey concludes that the recut is less bad than the theatrical version, though a touch slow and talky for a thriller, and that it answers the question of what Schrader had intended.⁸ A Letterboxd reviewer frames it as a filmmaker getting the last move and making the film he intended before studio intervention, while also calling it not a polished feature and, in the end, another entry in the fascinating story of the production.² Schrader has made Dark available in his archives at the Harry Ransom Center.⁶

Confusion with other titles named Dark

The 2017 date attaches to several unrelated works, which makes this film easy to misidentify. The best-known Dark of 2017 is the German Netflix science fiction series created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, first streamed on 1 December 2017, a time-travel mystery set in the town of Winden; it is a series, not a film.^{11 • 12} Other same-named films include Nick Basile's 2016 New York blackout thriller Dark starring Whitney Able¹³ and a 2018 Malayalam action film directed by Ajoy Varma.¹⁴ The Schrader film is distinguished by its cast (Cage, Yelchin, Jacob), its 75-minute runtime, and its origin as a director's recut of Dying of the Light.

References

1. Dark (2017), IMDb
2. Dark (2017) directed by Paul Schrader, including Schrader's statement, Letterboxd
3. Dark (2017), MUBI
4. Dark (2017) - Full cast & crew, IMDb
5. Where to Watch Dark (2017) Online, Plex
6. ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader, Edinburgh University Press
7. Dark (2017), dir. Paul Schrader, Musings on Films
8. Review | Dark (2017), MovieSteve
9. Review of Dark by Paul Schrader, Letterboxd
10. Dark (2017) - FAQ, IMDb
11. Dark, Cineuropa
12. Dark Streaming, FlixPatrol
13. Dark, Apple TV
14. Dark (2018), Apple TV

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026

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