Hey, Kids in Super Dark Times, Maybe Don’t Play with That Sword

by Ciara Dolan
Super Dark Times begins in a classroom, where an eight-point buck lies bleeding out on the linoleum floor after jumping through a school window. It’s a gruesome accident—a tragic miscalculation of the boundary between civilization and the wild.
It’s hard to say whether this film is about an evil samurai sword, or teenage boys losing their innocence and reckoning with their own (potentially dangerous) masculinity, or the secrets we keep and the scars we try to hid