In Tenebras: Into The Darkness Review (some spoilers)

Two brothers and their young sister set out to find the “lost” treasure in the WW2 tunnels of Gibraltar. Lucky for them, their grandfather handily left a map pinpointing its exact location. Literally X marks the spot.

The IMDB synopsis goes “Two brothers embark on an adventure of a lifetime -a journey deep inside the WW2 tunnels of Gibraltar to find a lost treasure. Complications arise and what started off as an adventure will end up as a life or death situation to survive.” When even the synopsis forgets the sister then…

The 3 siblings are podcast/youtube content creators, so filming everything to stream to Hank’s 2 million followers. When Josh ignores the talk of a curse and pockets a bit of the gold (I mean why bother finding it in the first place if they never wanted to take it?) then things start to go a bit wrong. The military are watching the caves as word of the curse must have been big enough to have an entire team of people just monitoring those caves.

The film has an interesting premise but unfortunately, it fails to deliver.

The sound quality is awful, voices sound like they were recorded on generic wireless mics from Tiktok shop. The story doesn’t make that much sense once they get into the tunnels, with the gold seemingly just behind a bit of plaster board right next to the tourist centre.

Anthony Loddo, Johan Wickholm and Rebecca Davis, playing the siblings, do a decent enough job with a stilted script. The parts when they’re talking to camera as podcasters are great, they sound just like podcasters. Unfortunately, that delivery continues throughout.

The soldiers, mainly seem to be Supporting artists so don’t speak, just nod at each other and raise hands to call over another silent soldier to look at a screen of stock, computer 3d topography with an unrelated Vitruvian monster spinning in the corner.

Costas Mandylor is completely under-utilised and seems to have been brought in just for a name on the poster.

There’s a scene where Sergeant Cummings has a discussion with her daughter along the lines of a middle manager welcoming the new hire to the office ‘hi, hows your first week going’ which turns into ‘Who’s my dad!’ Err, you’re in the middle of some kind of top secret military mission breaking out here! the script “…this isn’t really the time or place for this type of conversation”. Quite.

There’s many things working against this film, however it’s nicely shot, Gibraltar looks lovely. The setting should be perfect, but actually due to them actually showing they’re next to the visitor centre and the tunnel entrances are basically signposted, the idea of any peril is diluted. There’s some poor dialogue, not helped by the sound mix but then there’s certain parts that really work. The cast performances range from good to “I’m just reading this” and some of the reactions to terrible things that happen render them inconsequential.

So overall, In Tenebras: Into the Darkness is a mixed bag. If you fancy a bit of a cheesy horror adjacent adventure that would have taken prime spot on the video store DTV section then this will be right up your street.

Get past the bits that don’t work, and you’re left with a great idea with a decent enough cast and shot with half decent production value. You can see what they were going for and maybe with a bigger budget, they would have knocked it out of the park.