So, yeah, Will Sharpe. Will Sharpe is one of the country’s burgeoning talents. He does it all. He writes, he directs, he acts, he sings, he dances; I don’t know if he actually sings and dances, but frankly I wouldn’t be surprised. Ugh, talented people. Am I right?

Anyway, The Darkest Universe is his second feature, following 2011’s Black Pond. Here I’m maybe overselling; both films were co-directed with Tom Kingsley who doesn’t seem to have attracted anywhere near the same amount of attention, mayhaps because he was strictly behind the camera? Who knows, really. Furthermore, this film was co-written by Tiani Ghosh, who also hasn’t seen anywhere near the prominence of her co-writer. I’d hazard a guess that Sharpe’s ability to get in on basically the whole damn thing (write the feem toon, sing the feem toon) makes for easy promotion, though there’s also the fact that he had a solo writing/directing gig in Flowers (2016-2018), which, being on a major TV channel, received quite a bit of promotion and had a level of exposure that the independently produced films couldn’t hope to match. I do mean ‘independently produced’, by the way. Despite smacking of something the BFI or Film4 or the BBC would get in on, neither they nor any established studio, big or small or big-pretending-to-be-small à la Focus Features, seem to have taken part. 

Flowers is great, by the way. You should watch it.

The film is a self-professed “romantic comedy set in space, or – to be more specific – on planet Earth”. Quite. It follows Zac (Sharpe), a merchant banker sort (ho ho), who’s teetering on the edge. Things reach boiling point when his cloud-cuckoo sister, Alice (Ghosh), together with her similarly inclined boyfriend, Toby (Joe Thomas), unmoors her narrow boat and seemingly vanishes off the face of the Earth. When the po-po fail to find her, he does the not-at-all sensible thing and kicks off a public appeal before venturing off into the canal network to find them himself.

The thing thus follows a metaphysical mystery pattern, as Zac tries ineptly to figure out what actually happened. The solution may surprise you. Or not. Whatever. It’s all appealingly low key. The key conceit is he is the only one quite so concerned about it, coming to reorientate his entire raison d’être around the mystery in an unhealthy manner, yet in his initial state he has a similar sororal obsession; attempting to control her disorganised life, getting irritated by her lackadaisical bohemian lifestyle, and generally being overbearing. The film’s inciting incident is perhaps inevitable. A central idea is that she is coming into her own, while he is falling apart.

The claim of it being a ‘romantic comedy’ might be misleading. This signifier isn’t wrong per se, but it would presumably give a different impression of what the film might be than what it actually is. There’s romance, there’s comedy, occasionally the two meet, but it isn’t a romantic comedy in a conventional sense. While Alice and Toby’s relationship is perhaps that sort of fodder, the film’s viewpoint is squarely on Zac, making it akin to a romantic comedy from the perspective of an outsider, the ones left behind.

As such, the film trades in a melancholy yet absurd humour. Zac’s attempts to raise awareness of the disappearances and of his quest wryly emulate the some of the wince worthy sides of internet activism, maintaining a terrible earnestness in the face of absurdity. Though if I were to be cynical, the fact that he’s responding to a legitimate crisis in his life is perhaps the least plausible element. The internet: it’s terrible! Then again, the tepid engagement he apparently receives compared to more vapid and/or transparently selfish online crusades would seem to reflect reality. His increasing detachment from reality and deteriorating mental state are presented in a relatable manner, empathetic but with some level of awareness of the comedy involved. To that end, the film is probably not as accessible as moral panic and media hysteria theming of the earlier Black Pond. It’s non-linear approach to the narrative means it probably isn’t as much as the first series of Flowers, which premiered at around the same time, either.* The film intersperses the main throughline with flashbacks and dreamy opaque interludes that ambiguously suggest what’s happening on Alice’s end, and which might (and only might) make sense by the end of it all.



It worked for me. I laughed. Out loud. Quite genuinely. That doesn’t happen that much. It’s peculiar structure and refusal to posit actual answers would probably put some off, but it properly sets up its strategic ambiguity, and it all looks very nice doing it.

* The second, however, is probably more similar to Darkest Universe in terms of structure.