I did not read Dark Places nor Gone Girl (the other Flynn's book) but I can really said that movie is slow but captivating. Theron is as always excellent and modest. Her character does not shine like the female character in Gone Girl; in fact her character is really an accessory to the story that basically happens in flash backs.

As a murder mystery; the end is somewhat unexpected but not completely convincing; but it is obvious that the important thing was the sadness, misery and tough decisions some of the characters had to make and its consequences.

It is an interesting slow cooked movie; far from commercial but worth seeing anyway

I thought the film had a lot of really cool twist and turns that kept me guessing all the way to the end.

There were a lot of layers too it that did not jumble up on you to become too complicated. I guess the story was flushed out quite well by the filmmaker.

The film had a lot of cool elements too.

Charlize Theron plays Libby Day, the lone survivor of a massacre done by her brother of their entire family. Twenty years later, a convention of geeks that love serial killers, lead by Nicolas Hoult, contact her and pay her to help them prove that her brother did not do it. Even though she said he did Twenty years ago.

The movie lives up to the title. It points out how low a person can get on many different levels.

Good watch.

It's been a while since I've seen such a good old-fashioned whodunit on the big screen; the genre seems to be somewhat of a forgotten art in modern cinema. Compared to "Gone Girl", "Dark Places" is less flashy, less psychologically twisted, more down-to-earth, more plot-driven. It kept me wondering who-done-it until the end, and the solution is clever and unpredictable (let's just say there is a thin line between innocence and guilt in this movie). The narrative moves very smoothly and methodically between the present and the past, helped by a solid cast, well-selected in terms of the younger and the older actors who are called upon to play the same character (especially in the case of Chloë Grace Moretz and Andrea Roth). Recommended for fans of the genre. *** out of 4.