This film’s premise alone is probably enough to get people interested. A bunch of disaffected, socially backward and just plain strange adults get together biweekly, dress up in steel armour and gaudy medieval costumes, and pound each other with enormous padded swords. All the while, they’re carefully plotting each others’ (or each others’ ‘countries’) demise.

Yep, they’re nerds. The funny thing is that they seem to know it, and even funnier, they don’t really seem to care. For a group of social outcasts, the inhabitants of the imaginary world of ‘Darkon’ (a sort of Warhammer board game fraught real life) are for the most part incredibly articulate, thoughtful, and entirely self-aware.

The people documented in Darkon deliver some oddly affecting monologues. From the overweight and self-declared nerd who confesses that he really doesn’t know how to talk to a girl to the slightly hapless Skip, who seeks to redress his failure to follow in his father’s career footsteps by funnelling his energy into his family and the escapist fantasies of the Darkon world, these characters might begin with our pity but ultimately they earn our understanding and empathy.

Structurally and stylistically Darkon is relatively sound, but never threatens to amaze us. In fact, in seeking to convey the intensity of the game’s ‘battles’ by placing the camera right in the midst of the fight, the film becomes a confused blur, a hodgepodge of images and sound.

This attempt at flair points to a greater deficiency on the whole’Darkon is, as are a great many documentaries, absolutely uncinematic. But this is not a fatal blow. Darkon is a film about human beings, and that’s no small thing’style would be merely icing on the cake.

Finished reading this article? You might also like:

• Heart, Beating in the Dark
• Darkon
• Absolute Wilson