Movie Spotlight: The Dark One's Hand

Reev Nax doesn’t know where he came from. In the world of Varda, that uncertainty matters more than he knows. A prophecy names two figures, one feared and one hoped for, and the question hanging over the film is which one Reev is.

AJ Cooper adapted The Dark One’s Hand from his own young adult fantasy novel, then wrote, directed, produced, and acted every role himself. It’s a film entirely of one person’s vision, built with AI to render a world Cooper had been constructing in his imagination since childhood.

It started with Reev

Not the prophecy, not the villain. Cooper began with the character. “I wanted to create a character with a sense of destiny all about him,” he says. The hero-or-villain question came later, as the drafts evolved. In earlier versions it wasn’t as central. Eventually it became the question the whole film is built around, the one neither Reev nor the audience can fully answer.

Unknown origins

Reev’s parentage is a mystery, and Cooper built that ambiguity deliberately. “It creates all sorts of new questions for the viewer.” Hints are scattered through the film. The books already answer them for readers who want to know. For everyone else, the film is designed to leave possibilities open and the questions unresolved, which is exactly how Cooper wants it.

The prophecy, two ways

The Dark One’s Hand is a figure from Vardan mythology who serves an ancient evil called Seymus. Set against that is the Prince of the Dawn. “Part of the fun of the film is trying to figure out who this ultimate bad guy is,” Cooper says. Multiple people in the film claim to be the Dark One’s Hand. Some try to fight the mythological figure. And unlike in most fantasy, the doomsday believers here are right. “The beliefs of the doomsday cults are real, and you can see the effects on the screen.”

Building Varda

Cooper has been building this world since childhood. A bookshelf full of ancient and medieval history. Fantasy literature. The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the Warner Bros. Batman films. “This created a fertile leaf mold for me to create the world of Varda in book form,” he says. AI allowed him to translate that specific internal image to the screen without compromise. “I imagined it vividly, so it was just a matter of translating my mental image of the fantasy world into cinema.”

One vision

Playing every role and controlling every creative decision had a clear effect. “It definitely made me adhere to one vision with the story,” Cooper says. “It’s exactly what I imagined, my book translated to the screen. It’s a purely AJ Cooper film.” Reev’s mentor Gastreel functions as an adopted father figure, and the threads of inheritance and origin that the film lays out find their resolution in the completed novel series.

What to know before you press play

“I would like them to know that the film is a lifelong dream come true for me,” Cooper says. “And if they don’t want to wait to find out what happens after the end credits and for the next movies to be released, they can read the books.”

Fantasy

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Streaming now on Relay.