By Peter Keough

Screenwriter, film director, and novelist Charlie Kaufman tries to lighten up in Orion and the Dark.

Hanging out with the Dark: a scene from Orion and the Dark. Photo: Netflix

Orion and the Dark. Directed by Sean Charmitz. Adapted by Charlie Kaufman from the book by Emma Yarlett. Available on Netflix on February 2.

Charlie Kaufman took animation on before in the weird and brilliant Anomalisa (2015). There he could freely explore his obsessions with solipsism, isolation, absurdity, mortality, and such bizarre psychological maladies as the Capgras syndrome. But he is teamed up with DreamWorks animation and director Sean Charmitz in this adaptation of Emma Yarlett’s picture book, so he seems torn between his own darkest, most twisted impulses and the sentimentality and simplemindedness that are the hallmarks of mediocre children’s films and storytelling. As one child in the film complains about such drivel, “Parents love simple stories … because whatever problem the character has, it all gets fixed, and then they don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

Not worrying is a real challenge for 13-year-old Orion (voiced by a shrill Jacob Tremblay) — named after the mythic hunter, the constellation, or perhaps the defunct movie studio. He lives in constant fear of heights, wasps, dogs, the ocean, cell phone waves, clowns, clogging the toilet, the pretty girl in his class, locker rooms, bullies, his teacher Mrs. Spinoza (a Kaufman touch perhaps), and an upcoming field trip to the planetarium (shades of Rebel Without a Cause). In short, everything. Or perhaps nothing, as in nonexistence, the abyss.

But his biggest fear is the dark, here personified as “Dark” (more dork than Dark as voiced by Paul Walter Hauser). As part of what appears to be a variation on A Christmas Carol, he shows up one night to confront the whiny pre-adolescent. Dark is as fed up with Orion as are his parents — and the viewers too most likely. Irritated no end by the bad rap scaredy-cat kids like Orion are giving him, the Dark pulls out a short — very short — film about himself narrated by no less than Werner Herzog. When that fails to win Orion over, Dark takes him along on his nightly rounds, during which he introduces his unwilling guest to the various Night Entities — Dreams, Sleep, Unexplained Noises, Insomnia (“Why is that even a job?” Orion asks ruefully), and Quiet — who are his chthonic coworkers.

But the animation depicting this midnight ride and these nocturnal sidekicks proves a disappointment — they make the personified abstractions of Inside Out (2015) look like strokes of surreal genius. Orion himself criticizes this very kind of pablum as he watches a kid-friendly cartoon about the value of recycling on TV. “This cartoon is completely unrealistic,” he scoffs. “Recycled items do not have eyes or personalities. They do not go on adventures. I don’t appreciate being condescended to. And reincarnation is wishful thinking — for plastic containers and people.”

Fortunately, Orion and the Dark is not all recycled bad animation and treacly pedantry. Kaufman seems to have had some input in the imagery; he certainly had a hand in shaping the narrative structure. For example, it might be my imagination but most of the background faces look the same, many of them resembling Orion’s father, which is reminiscent of the manifestations of the Fregoli delusion in Anomalisa. Kaufman also has addled the plot with a story-within-a-story-within-a-story multigenerational framework, a bit of Adaptation-like sleight of hand that might confuse the kids who are watching as well strain the patience and credulity of some of the grownups.

One of the most Kaufmanesque characteristics of the film, however, is its inexorable return to the terror that Dark only veils — death, nothingness, madness, and the void. “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” Orion reflects in voice-over as he swirls in blackness surrounded by books with titles like Nihilism versus Existentialism for Kids. “The realization that there is no way around it terrifies me. I try to imagine what death is like. I’ve concluded it’s like nothing. I try to imagine nothing.” The screen goes black. “This is black and silent, not nothing. Blackness and silence is something. Nothing is perhaps the one unimaginable thing.”

At this point something unimaginable starts rattling his closet door. Luckily, Orion’s mother calls his name and rescues him from whatever it is, if only temporarily, with a goodnight kiss (she declines to read to him from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a bedtime story). I can imagine parents at this point ushering their bewildered children from the theater. And it’s scarcely 10 minutes into the film.

Nonetheless, this being a DreamWorks movie, we can’t leave Orion frozen in front of a door that is about to open into who knows what. Though, to the film’s credit — but probably not to its box office fortunes — the door never quite goes away. Also, in the course of their perfunctorily imagined adventures Orion and Dark become buddies. Until, that is, Orion’s meddling alienates Dark’s colleagues and a despondent Dark gives up. He submits to the annihilating rays of his nemesis, the beaming blowhard “Light,” pitching the world into perpetual day.

The unintended consequences of this, at one time Orion’s fervent wish, leave the world in the throes of a disaster reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. What would a children’s film about terror be without a tip of the hat to the dire fate awaiting us all — environmental doom? And the only escape from that, apparently, is to enter the portal of one’s own mind, à la Being John Malkovich (1999).

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).