Darkness in Detroit.

Sometimes a movie doesn’t have to be great. It just has to have a timely context. This one dates to 2010. It’s a modest sci fi movie with a good cast and a better than average script. Not MUCH better than average, but better than Stephen King or Rod Serling could do. Not the TMI dialogue of King or the TMI messaging of Serling. Result? A movie length Twilight Zone episode without the precious sermonizing at the end. Like the Japanese do so much better than we do. (Oh wait. They already made this movie too. And it was haunting.)

Okay. This one isn’t haunting. It’s suddenly “Mystery Science Theater 3000” starring Hayden Christiansen, John Leguizamo, and Thandie Newton.

A palpable predatory darkness suddenly attacks the City of Detroit. People disappear, leaving only their clothes behind. The few survivors are those who were holding or wearing lights at the time. (Smokers who were lighting up got spared; amazing that NPR liked the film.)

You’re thinking, “Is this another episode of the dreary Left Behind franchise?” But NO, it isn’t. Or NPR wouldn’t have liked it, right?

Sunrise gets later, sunset gets earlier. Our focus is reduced to a bar bearing the lights “Sonny’s Happy Hour.” Cool.

When the inner jeering starts. What’s the darkness that’s stalking the survivors? It’s fucking Detroit. Maybe umpty generations of liberal tax and spend liberal politics that sucked the life out of everything. Or maybe it’s the Tea Party attacking the rights of the welfare state. Or is it even worse than that? One after another dies proclaiming the words “I exist,” which suggests that maybe we don’t, that there’s a new statist sense in which we don’t actually exist anymore. Even that our only freedom lies in surrender to the annihilating darkness.

It all works pretty damn good for the Detroit of 2013, don’t it? What I mean by context.

Watch this movie and there will be times you’ll be sure you can see the Obama administration flowing down the street.

Of course, the bottom line is the old reliable leftist truism of unforgivable sin. The only ones permitted to survive are children. The rest of us must die. Even the cars of Detroit have to die. The kids will have to escape on a horse fed by organic apples. How cool is that?

Who knows more about light than children who don’t know anything?