Dark Days (2000)
There are documentaries that succeed on craft, and then there are documentaries that succeed because they take you somewhere you would never otherwise go. Dark Days is firmly the second kind. The moment you understand what Marc Singer has actually done here, you are already half-hooked: he spent an extended period living in the tunnel system beneath New York City, among a community of homeless people who had built permanent homes in the dark, below the roar and rush of one of the most famous cities on earth. Most of us have never given a second's thought to what might be happening underneath our feet. Singer forces you to.
And what is happening down there is stranger and more affecting than you might expect. This is not a film about isolated figures huddled under blankets. What Singer documents is something closer to a functioning neighbourhood, improvised out of necessity and stubbornness and ingenuity. These people had rigged up electricity. They had televisions. They had dogs, furniture, routines. There is a moment, absorbing the sheer domesticity of some of these makeshift dwellings, where the ground shifts slightly under you. The film's implicit question, never laboured or spelled out, is quietly devastating: if you can build all of this in a tunnel, what exactly kept you from building it up above?
Singer's approach earns that intimacy. Having lived among his subjects and, by all accounts, brought many of them in as collaborators on the shoot itself, he gets interviews that feel genuinely unguarded. These are people talking plainly, sometimes painfully, about the routes that led them underground, whether addiction, trauma, fear, or simple disillusionment with the surface world's systems and demands. The grainy, black-and-white photography suits all of this well enough: it matches the murk and the mood, and there is something fitting about a film set in darkness that looks like it was dragged up from some earlier, rougher era of filmmaking.
That said, the image quality is a genuine barrier for some stretches. It is one thing to embrace a raw, handheld aesthetic; it is another when the footage occasionally becomes difficult to parse, and a 2000 documentary starts to look like archive material from twenty years before. It is worth pushing through, but it is a friction worth naming.
The bigger reservation is structural. Dark Days makes its central point vividly and early, and then it more or less keeps making it. The immersion is real, but the film lacks a sense of building toward anything. It observes, it accrues detail, it lets you sit with these people and their world, but by the final act you can feel it circling rather than arriving somewhere new. It runs a trim eighty-two minutes, which is about right for what it has to say, and I think a longer cut would have exposed that limitation far more harshly.
For a companion piece in a very different key, I found Time grappled with related questions about who the system leaves behind and how people survive inside the gaps, though with considerably more formal ambition driving it forward.
None of that changes the fact that Dark Days is a window onto something most of us will never see, rendered with genuine care and a hard-won closeness to its subjects. As a document of a hidden world, it is hard to look away from. It stops just short of greatness, held back by its own narrowness of scope and the rough limitations of the footage. But as a piece of committed, humane filmmaking about people the city above ground had largely decided not to see? It more than earns its place.
Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2000 | Watched: 2026-09-02
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Night Flight Plus · OVID · Cineverse Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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