Super Dark Times (not rated)
Facebook; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; Hulu; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 2017, but I didn't see it until 2022. It's set sometime in the 90s, though I didn't feel like that made any difference to the story. The movie did pretty well with critics, and I can kind of see why, but I'm afraid I couldn't get that into it. Objectively I'm sure it deserves a higher rating, maybe a much higher rating, than I've given it. I dunno. I considered not even writing a review, but I figured I might as well.

There are two teenage best friends named Zach and Josh, who are both interested in a girl named Allison. One day Zach and Josh are hanging out with a couple of other kids, Daryl and Charlie. They look around at the stuff in the room belonging to Josh's older brother, who is away in the Marines, and find both some marijuana and a sword. Daryl wants the marijuana, but Josh doesn't want to let him have it. A bit later, while they're outside playing with the sword, it turns out Daryl took the marijuana anyway, and he gets into a fight with Josh. This results in Josh accidentally killing Daryl with the sword. The three boys hide Daryl's body and bike and the sword.

Zach and Josh both have a hard time getting on with their lives after that, but they deal with it in different ways. Mostly we see Zach and his budding relationship with Allison. But eventually another kid dies, apparently falling off a bridge, and Zach suspects Josh of killing him. I'm not sure why. I mean, there was at one point a very rushed explanation Zach made on a phone call to Charlie, but I couldn't follow it. Anyway, I still have no idea if Josh killed the kid or not, but later he definitely does do some super dark things.

And that's pretty much all I can say. It was nicely atmospheric, in a way, which I think is what the critics liked about it, or at least that's part of it. But a lot of the movie just felt too ordinary to me to be particularly interesting. Parts of it were pretty good, though.