‘Out Of Darkness’ Review — The first great horror movie of 2024

A review of the new Stone Age horror film, in theaters now

Out of Darkness opens on a handful of people around a campfire. They’re dressed in furs and huddled together by the flickering flame, hunkered down as darkness presses in on all sides. “Beyah, tell me a story,” asks a boy named Heron (Luna Mwezi), the youngest of the group. Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green) — a teenage girl herself — declines, reminding him that she’s not his mother; instead, an older man named Odal (Arno Lüning) steps in. He spins a yarn about brave explorers traveling across the sea, desperate to find new hunting grounds. There’s a leader, and a pregnant woman, and an old man carrying the wisdom of the life they left behind. It’s quickly clear that he’s talking about them.

This is a movie set tens of thousands of years in the past, when the world was new and people were, too. It takes place in a subtitled language called Tola, a tongue invented entirely for the film as a way to approximate what Stone Age humans might have sounded like. It’s a guttural, yet beautiful language, apparently based heavily on Basque and Arabic and developed by a poet. Immediately, as these explorers tell one another the story of their lives, it’s entrancing.