Dark Days (2000)

Recalling the films of Robert Frank, Dark Days is a compassionate and haunting portrait of a subterranean community of the homeless. The two years director Marc Singer spent living in the catacombs of New York's train tunnels dumpster-diving for food clearly paid off: Singer's documentary boasts a surprising intimacy between his homeless subjects and the camera -- on numerous occasions they banter as freely with Singer as they do with each other. The director manages to draw out some exchanges that are both funny --as when Lee gives a rambling but impassioned speech about his decreased pets -- and horrific -- as when Ralph recalls his child's rape and dismemberment. The past for many of the tunnel people is a constant source of torment, be it Dee's loss of her children to a house fire or the disintegration of Ralph's marriage due to crack. In spite of the bad air, perpetual darkness, and rats, most subterranean dwellers argue that life in the tunnel is infinitely preferable to the streets, where they are prey to crime and the elements. Beneath Manhattan, they have constructed shanties out of lumber and cardboard and furnished them with TVs, powered straight off the city's grid. Their daily life makes up a large part of the film's structure: we see how they eat, shower, and kill time. One character points out the best dumpster in which to find good food, arguing that the grub is not only clean, but kosher too, while another has managed to construct a shower of sorts from a leaking water main. Thanks to Singer's stark black and white cinematography, Dark Days has the claustrophobic quality of the bottom of the ocean, which adds to its taunt intensity. Although its ending is oddly mushy and seemingly inconsistent with the rest of the work, Dark Days is a powerful document of humanity's will to survive and a first-rate piece of urban ethnography. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide