Chris and Aurora, children of a broken home, travel to the woods to spend the weekend with their estranged Father and his new wife. Upon arriving the family pet, a Black Lab, wanders off into the woods only to be found severely injured and must be put down. The night gets worse when a stranger enters the home and holds everyone at gunpoint, claiming that there is something in the woods. From that point on fear takes over.

My experience with Dawning was an unfortunate one that was plagued by a lot of things that made this “Best Movie of 2010” one of the worst I’ve seen in 2011. For starters the audio mix here is poorly. With a Stereo 2.0 mix the volume of the film is an up down affair. I understand that it’s a psychological thriller and by not being able to take in every spoken word it equates to some later surprise or paranoia induced element, but for me it was simply annoying and I spent the hour and twenty minutes moving my volume up and down, up and down. I would suggest sitting close enough to your TV that you can hear and not applying to much volume to your surround sound or set as the sneak attack jolts of music, common in horror films, are in fact much louder then the dialogue.

Another couple of issues I had with the film were writing and acting. By the end of this film I felt like, while buried way, way, way down deep there was a brilliant idea for a psychological horror film, execution and idea were weak at best. There are a couple of scenes were a character will grasp for an understanding of their situation, understandably, but these moments go on for too long and the actor or actress that is playing up the fear induced confusion rarely sells it. These are usually moments in the film that are used as spacers to reveal the next moment in a string of horror events, and by prolonging the moment with such bad execution you’ve been given enough time to put two and two together and the shock factor after that is gone. In any case, as an overall story, it simply feels fractured.

Things like character development, revelation, entertainment, their all missing from Dawning. I love psychological horror films. I love being fooled into the panic and the paranoia and then getting that big reveal at the end that just blows your mind away. Dawning had a few moments in the film that had you second guessing the entire situation, waiting for something that was less monstrous and more human to arise from the poorly laid out plot to satisfy your patience. Nothing. Unfortunately my press copy was lacking the Writer/Director commentary to help me navigate the film a little better but I did take it upon myself to peruse the scattered reviews across the net to maybe open my eyes to something I may have missed. What I got from the people who loved it was that this was a story about inner demons. If so why even bring up some of the more supernatural occurances in the film? In any case Dawning could possibly be one of those films that you need to watch several times to finally get, but for me, watching once was all the dissapointment I could take. As always, final judgment is yours.