by Ciara Dolan
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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 hide. But it’s probably about all three, and specifically, how humans learn to navigate the blurred line between our civilized selves and our wild, unknown selves.