Movies: Darker Than Black Vol. 1

Personal policy dictates that any story you cannot summarize in two sentences is probably not worth the trouble. I’m happy to break this rule for Darker Than Black, because while it has a story so convoluted it must have given the back-of-the-box copywriters at FUNimation total fits, it’s a grabber for that exact reason. There’s a fine line between convoluted and confusing, and they dance along that line very carefully in this series.

Darker Than Black starts ten years after some cataclysm — the opening of “the Gate” — the end result of which was the construction of a giant wall around Tokyo. (Whether to seal something in or out, it’s not clear.) Since then, people with strange new powers have appeared — “Contractors”, as they’re called — who sell their powers to the highest bidder and are feared by the powers that be worldwide. Those who come into contact with Contractors have their memories forcibly erased by the authorities — that is, those who aren’t killed by the Contractors themselves.

Contractors are a curious bunch. No two of them sport the same powers, but in every case their powers come at a cost: when they run out of energy, they must complete a sort of obsessive-compulsive personal ritual to “recharge”. Mostly it’s something innocuous, like dog-earing every single page in a book, or laying down a hundred stones in a perfect grid. Sometimes it’s a lot more than that; in a moment that struck me as a sidelong reference to Blade Runner, one Contractor has to break his own fingers in order to continue.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.