Why aren’t there more thrillers about teenagers? It’s a genre that relies on extremes—hot tempers, bad decisions, and the general sense that everything is a matter of life and death. Who can relate to those feelings more than a teen?
Enter Super Dark Times, now on Netflix. Set in suburban upstate New York in the mid-’90s, Super Dark Times captures a particularly fraught period of adolescence: The moment when longtime friends realize that their life paths have already begun to diverge. Zach (Owen Campbell), a quiet and kind-hearted young teen, is taking his first awkward steps toward actual adulthood. Josh (Charlie Tahan), his best friend, is a geek with a temper, often retreating into the safety of video games. And it doesn’t help that the two boys each have a crush on a fellow classmate named Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino, who you might remember as the young Jessica from Jessica Jones).
Still, Zach and Josh have enough in common to waste long, aimless days doing the bullshit teenage boys often end up doing: Having pointless debates about superheroes, watching scrambled porn, eating the grossest food they can find at the local gas station, and screwing around with stuff they shouldn’t be touching.
It’s in this final category that Super Dark Times suddenly shifts from an impressionistic coming-of-age story to a nerve-jangling thriller. The boys borrow a model katana and take it out to the woods, slicing up milk cartons in a pale imitation of badassery. But a squabble with another teenager gets out of hand, and Josh fatally stabs him by mistake, leaving the boys standing around with the dead body of a classmate.
This is the moment at which Zach and Josh have a big choice to make. Don’t get me wrong: It is very bad to have to rush to a police station and tell them you accidentally another kid with a katana. But it is much, much worse to hide your classmate’s body and try to pretend nothing happen. Guess which choice these teenagers make?
The remainder of Super Dark Times plays out as a slow-burn thriller as each boy deals with the fallout from the killing in his own unique way. Zach is plagued by hallucinatory nightmares, desperate to exorcise his guilt about the coverup, and increasingly paranoid about what’s really going on inside his best friend’s head. Josh, for his part, is alternately erratic and withdrawn, lashing out at teachers and spending long, solitary hours in his bedroom. And all the while, they’re watching the clock, waiting to find out what will happen when the victim’s body is inevitably discovered.
I don’t want to spoil where this story ends up going—except to warn that the climax is a bit of a letdown—but I will say that Super Dark Times gets what it means to be a teenager: Frustrated and underestimated and temperamental and also kind of dumb. The killing is the movie’s big hook, but what’s really impressive is the way first-time feature director Kevin Phillips manages to delve into all the pre-internet awkwardness of being any kind of teenager—not just an accidentally homicidal one. The most horrifying thing about Super Dark Times is that it feels like it could be about any bored, dumb, impulsive teen. And by the end, it is a kind of coming-of-age story—though not in the way you might expect.
