“This too shall pass,” Stan Deen tells his students.
Stan knows that in the life of a teenager, even the smallest problem can feel monumental. And so he tries to impart some of the wisdom that has come to him with time and experience. Many of his students eventually realize he’s right: All things eventually do pass, often without the dramatic outcomes they expected. As a result, they’ve come to respect Stan and trust him.
But Nathan Williams is another matter. All Stan really knows about Nate is that he’s in foster care, he’s a decent athlete, and his grades are poor. Oh, and he just got arrested for burglary.
Still, Stan sees something promising in the teen. He knows that Nate has had some seriously tough luck. But with the right guidance, he believes Nate could become a great man.
So, Stan pulls a few strings to get the prison warden and judge (both former students) to release Nate into his custody. Then he pulls a few more to get Nate’s probation officer (another former pupil) to cut the wayward teen a few breaks.
Unfortunately, that was the easy part. The hard part will be getting Nate to trust him—to accept that Stan is offering this gift, this opportunity, purely out of the goodness of his own heart.
[Caution: This review contains spoilers.]
Stan Deen is a good man. He truly cares about all his students. And he takes a special interest in Nate because he believes the world has gotten the narrative wrong about this adolescent boy.
Instead of pouring out obligations, Stan pours out love and kindness. He guides Nate not with stringent requirements but with gentle suggestions. When the teen gets upset, Stan welcomes his fury, taking the verbal abuse and allowing Nate to vent his frustrations. However, Stan is also careful not to let Nate get away with things, either. Part of Nate’s release is contingent on him sitting in jail for three days to “get a taste” of what prison will be like if he fails to meet the judge’s requirements. After completing this time, he tells Stan it “sucked,” and Stan tells him that’s a good thing: “It wasn’t supposed to be the Ritz.”
It’s hard for Nate to accept Stan’s good intentions. As far as Nate’s concerned, everyone is working some sort of angle to get what they want—and he believes Stan is no different. However, time and again, Stan proves himself to Nate. He has no ulterior motives. Stan just wants what’s best for Nate.
Of course, that isn’t to say that Stan is perfect. When Nate screws up, the two exchange harsh words. And in the heat of the moment, Stan is crueler than he perhaps means to be. However, when Nate needs him most, Stan shows up, standing by the teenager’s side and continuing to help him.
As a result, Nate finally learns to trust Stan, confessing everything from his childhood, everything that people held against him because they didn’t have the real story. In turn, Stan helps Nate process his trauma and build a better life.
Several characters sing “This Little Light of Mine” throughout the film. Stan appears to pray while doctors try to save a young man’s life. Nate’s mom wears a cross necklace. A crucifix hangs from the rearview mirror of his grandparents’ car. A cross is carved into a headstone.
As a joke, Stan says to his students, “God knows when we will meet again. Actually, I do!” before relaying details for their next rehearsal.
Nate’s girlfriend, Tina, seemingly flirts with another guy at school. Later, after Nate gets arrested, her dad forbids her from seeing Nate, so she breaks up with him. She starts dating the guy she was flirting with before. And she even makes out with Nate’s best friend at a party.
A teenage couple makes out on someone’s bed before they’re kicked out by the owner. Other teen couples dance and kiss. Nate and Tina are very flirty and touchy-feely when they’re together.
Several scenes show Nate without a shirt, including one picturing him from the waist up in the shower. When he’s initially processed at the prison, a strategic camera angle keeps us from glimpsing his lower half as a strip search is conducted.
As a child, Nate watches his mom kiss and dance with her new boyfriend, who lives with them. And we learn he asked if this man would become his new daddy.
Brave the Dark depicts three different suicide attempts—one of which results in the deaths of two people as part of a tragic murder/suicide. Medical professionals keep another attempt from ending in death.
Nate’s mother, Gloria, was a victim of domestic abuse. Flashbacks show her with a nasty bruise on her arm. We also see the man she’s with (Nate’s father) put a cigarette out on his own arm as a threat to Nate. And in a desperate moment, Gloria contemplates taking both her and Nate’s lives to escape that man.
Nate says police kicked his dad out of the house, but he continued to stalk Gloria. After she seemingly moves on, Nate’s dad waits for Gloria’s new beau to leave, then drags her out of the house by her hair. He shoots her in front of Nate, who is just 6 years old. Then the father turns the rifle on himself, putting the barrel into his mouth before turning his back and pulling the trigger. We don’t see the moment of death onscreen, but we hear it. And someone bathes Nate later, washing his parents’ blood off his face and body.
Nate gets into several fights with one of his classmates for flirting with Tina. When Tina eventually rejects Nate for his reckless behavior, he punches a glass window in anger, shattering it and cutting his hand. And in another instance of rejection, he grabs Tina’s wrist, hurting her.
Nate uses a BB gun to shoot a pane of glass, photographing it for one of his classes. We later learn this is because of the memory of his dad shooting his mom through the windowpane of their front door.
There are about 10 uses of the s-word. We also hear “a–hole,” “b–tards,” “douche,” “h—,” “jerk-off” and “p-ss.” The f-word substitute “frickin’” is heard several times. God’s name is misused at least seven times.
During an argument, Stan starts to call Nate an “ungrateful little” s-word. He cuts himself off before saying the profanity, but Nate tells him to finish the phrase, so Stan does.
Nate goes on a bit of a bender with his buddy after a bad fight with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. Not long after that, when he learns a devastating truth about his past, Nate allows that same friend to influence him into making some bad decisions. First, they invite a couple of girls over to Stan’s house to drink. Before he knows it, the gathering has turned into a full-blown party, with lots of underage drinking. And after someone accidentally breaks a keg, the party migrates elsewhere, leaving Nate to clean up the mess by himself.
When Stan arrives home, he’s furious, and after an argument, Nate leaves to rejoin his friends. His buddy gives him narcotics at the new party location. Nate, under the influence of the drugs, attempts to take his own life.
Several characters, including Nate, smoke cigarettes.
Nate’s grandparents are ashamed to be associated with his father, and they blame their daughter for her own demise by getting “mixed up” with him. They gaslight Nate regarding the circumstances of his parents’ deaths, telling everyone that Gloria died in a car crash and calling Nate a liar when he mentions the shooting.
Part of the reason Nate becomes a thief is because he believes the lies his grandparents have sown: Because his father was a bad man, he must be too. And Nate struggles to process his mother’s death and the subsequent mental trauma (from the gaslighting and lies) throughout the film.
Nate lived with his grandparents for a time after his parents’ deaths. But they transferred his custody to an orphanage, warning his new caretakers that he might lie about his parents. As a result, Nate stopped talking altogether for two years.
After that, Nate was moved into a series of foster homes. But by the time he got to his fourth home, he decided to break out on his own. He began living out of his car, joining his school’s track team so he could use the showers after practice and scrounging the school vending machines for loose food. (Stan first takes an interest in Nate after witnessing him fighting with a vending machine. He gives Nate a large chocolate bar out of pity. Later, he learns that was the first food Nate had had in three days.)
Nate and his friends break into an electronics store and make off with several valuable items. He’s later caught and arrested in front of the whole school. Nate’s teachers debate whether this was a wise choice, with some arguing that it would alienate him further and others suggesting that it could be a wake-up call. Nate lies to police that he was the only person involved; and while this choice demonstrates loyalty, Nate’s friends do not accord him the same allegiance.
Nate is temporarily transferred back to his grandparents’ custody before he goes to live with Stan. While there, they continue to gaslight him about his mom’s death, and they also force him to drop out of school and get a job to pay them back for posting his bail.
Stan’s colleagues tell him that taking Nate under his wing is a mistake. But Stan retorts that it’s their own fault for failing to see how much the teen was struggling and not helping him sooner.
Deb, a fellow teacher and Stan’s friend, sadly recounts how she let a student like Nate down once. The girl had lost her father, and then her mother became an alcoholic. Deb tried to take the teen under her wing, but it put too much of a strain on her family. So, Deb admits, she allowed the girl to slip through the cracks and into the foster system, never seeing her again.
How many of us have a teacher or a coach who inspired us? How often do we hear stories about a kind word at the right moment turning someone’s life around?
Angel Studios’ Brave the Dark is based on the true story of Stan Deen and Nate Williams. Stan was the first person in more than a decade to show genuine interest and kindness toward Nate; nobody had been so invested in him since his mother passed away. In fact, Stan had such an impact on young Nate’s life that Nate eventually changed his last name to match that of his foster father.
But Nate wasn’t the only person impacted by Stan’s kindness. So many of Stan’s students would point to him as someone they could trust, someone who helped them get through a difficult point in their youth. And all simply because he woke up every day and chose to be a positive influence in the lives around him.
That’s a wonderful message, but families should be warned that this is a truly harrowing story. It pushes the bounds of its PG-13 rating. And in spite of the high school setting, I would counsel strong caution before showing it to younger or impressionable adolescents, especially any teen who’s struggled with suicidal ideation.
A 6-year-old boy (not to mention audiences watching) bears witness to the bloody murder-suicide of his parents. There are two other depictions of attempted suicide and a few of domestic abuse. A teenager almost dies from a drug overdose. And language gets pretty coarse, too, with multiple uses of the s-word.
Audiences should also consider some messages about foster care before viewing. Nate first enters foster care because he came from an abusive situation—one that took the lives of both his parents. His grandparents furthered that abuse by gaslighting him and lying to others about his background. That alone may deter some viewers who perhaps have similar experiences.
However, Nate was eventually sent to an orphanage where the caretakers were much kinder, if ill-equipped, to handle his trauma (and they’re not helped by the fact that they were misinformed by his grandparents). And he finally winds up under the guardianship of Stan—who becomes a father to Nate in every sense of the word.
Those are some great messages in this story. But I still cannot emphasize how mixed they are with hard content. So families should strongly consider all elements of this plot before heading out to the theater.
Throughout the film, as Nate shifts from one home to the next, he carries his belongings in a trash bag. Wait No More by Focus on the Family knows this image all too well. Many children in foster care are forced to grab their belongings quickly and shove them into the first thing they can find—often a plastic garbage bag. Wait No More seeks to end this by providing children in foster care with a suitcase they can call their own. Each Wait No More suitcase has three things inside: a Bible, a teddy bear and a handwritten letter to remind that child how much he/she is loved. You can read more about this program and donate to sponsor a suitcase bundle at https://www.waitnomore.org/suitcases/.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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