Dark Mind

Sometimes a low-budget movie just can't pull it off. Dark Mind, a 2006 film by Nicholas Peterson, has some interesting ideas and creates a properly paranoid atmosphere, but the overall effect is shoddy and cheap looking, with amateurish performances and slapdash special effects.

Reminiscent of Darren Aranofksy's Pi, Dark Mind is about the unraveling of a genius. Christopher Kennedy Masterson is a young man who always wanted to be an inventor. Set sometime in the early '60s, he wins a young inventor prize, but his father steals the money. He finds out that his father also stole most of his inventions. He starts working on his grand idea, which he calls the "cube," and borrows money from the mob to finance it. Taking far longer to make his idea come to fruition, he must hide from the mob, and takes a new identity in California.

He rents an apartment and works feverishly on his idea, all the while slowly succumbing to the notion that people are after him. He befriends a pretty young waitress (Lyndsy Fonseca), but when she innocently comes to visit him to return a notebook he left in the cafe, he attacks her. This gains the interest of the police, who question him about missing persons. Meanwhile his mentor, a Russian scientist, hovers around the scene, tying the film into its epigraph, which is quotation from Joseph McCarthy.

This summary may make the film sound better than it is. Though this could have been the core of a good movie, it's something of a mess. The film is edited by its director, but not very well. The photography is unnecessarily dark and muddy. The only saving grace is a fantastic credits sequence (it doesn't say much of a film that it's best moments are over after a minute or two) and a fine score by Jasper Randall.

Masterson, whose shoulders the film rests on, is game but ultimately ill-equipped to handle it. He's just not engaging enough. He is, I should add, a natural to play the lead if anyone ever wants to make the Wall Cox story.