Entertainment
Charlize Theron's Forgotten R-Rated Thriller On Netflix, Explores A Twisted Past
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Around the time Charlize Theron was transitioning out of one massive studio project (a little film called Mad Max: Fury Road) and into something far smaller and more restrained, she took on the 2015 crime thriller Dark Places. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name and fully committed to its mystery, Dark Places was mostly forgotten upon release, earning just over $5 million at the box office against its reported $11.9 million production budget. Even worse, the film took a beating on the critical front, landing at 23 percent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a not much better 33 percent approval rating on the Popcornmeter.
While I don’t necessarily agree with that harsh of an assessment, Dark Places is a difficult watch because it tries to do too much at once. It’s one of those cases where the timelines it explores are better suited for the page than the screen. What’s meant to be a present-day mystery informed by grisly events from decades earlier becomes a narrative tangle, which is frustrating because the screenplay itself is solid, the acting is even better, and the individual components mostly work. The problem is how those components collide.
Defined By Trauma, Motivated By Money
Dark Places’ present-day mystery centers on Libby Day (Charlize Theron), the sole survivor of a family massacre that occurred when she was just 8 years old, portrayed in flashbacks by Sterling Jerins. Her older brother Ben (Corey Stoll) was charged with the crime and is currently serving a life sentence. Ben insists that Libby never knew the whole story, and that when he was a teenager, portrayed by Tye Sheridan, there were other suspects who were never properly considered.
In the present day, Libby survives on donations tied to her notoriety as the girl whose family was murdered. As the years pass and public interest fades, that money dries up, creating financial pressure that not even her ghostwritten book is able to relieve. When Libby is approached by Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) and invited to speak at his true crime club, she agrees on the condition that she’s paid. Defined by her trauma and motivated by survival, Libby sees it as a necessary move to keep the lights on. That calculation changes quickly once she realizes what Lyle is actually after.
While Lyle does run a true crime club, it operates on two very different levels. The bottom floor caters to casual hobbyists, while the upper floor is filled with people who dedicate their free time to actively solving cold cases. Lyle believes Ben may be innocent, but Libby’s childhood testimony was compelling enough to secure a conviction. As far as Libby remembers, she told the truth. Still, she’s forced to confront the idea that memories formed under extreme trauma may not be as reliable as she once believed.
Initially showing up purely for the money, Libby agrees to visit her brother in prison to hear his version of events. That conversation sends her along a breadcrumb trail of half-buried truths, pushing her closer to the possibility that someone else murdered her family while Ben took the fall.
Two-Story Structure Kills The Momentum
On paper, Dark Places has a compelling setup. An estranged brother and sister work toward the same goal years after they’re separated, each carrying their own version of the truth. The tension is baked in, since Libby’s testimony put Ben behind bars, even though she was just a child and every piece of evidence at the time pointed directly at him. Ben has either accepted his fate or is playing a long game that even Lyle and his crew of amateur sleuths can’t fully see through.
Alternating with the present-day story is a second narrative set in 1985, leading up to the night of the murders. These scenes are drip-fed with the intention of eventually colliding with the present-day revelations. It’s a strong idea conceptually, but one that becomes unwieldy in execution. The audience can slowly piece things together as the film goes, but by the time Dark Places reaches its midpoint, most of the major cards are already on the table if you’re familiar with the genre.
Dark Places leans heavily into well-worn tropes, and to its credit, it executes them competently. The downside of that level of reliability is a story structure that follows a painfully familiar logic, which softens the impact of the mystery. The dual narrative is meant to heighten the tension, but instead it undercuts its own reveal. While I wouldn’t argue that Dark Places deserves its current critical score, it’s easy to understand why it left so many viewers feeling underwhelmed. All the pieces for a compelling thriller are present, they just never lock together in a way that feels satisfying.
For its performances and its core concept alone, Dark Places is worth a watch. But if you’re hoping for a mystery that really gets its hooks into you, this probably isn’t the one that will do it.
Dark Places is streaming on Netflix.
Entertainment
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
Entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s essay, “Something Big Is Happening,” is going mega-viral on X, where it’s been viewed 42 million times and counting.
The piece warns that rapid advancements in the AI industry over the past few weeks threaten to change the world as we know it. Shumer specifically likens the present moment to the weeks and months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, and says most people won’t hear the warning “until it’s too late.”
We’ve heard warnings like this before from AI doomers, but Shumer wants us to believe that this time the ground really is shifting beneath our feet.
“But it’s time now,” he writes. “Not in an ‘eventually we should talk about this’ way. In a ‘this is happening right now and I need you to understand it’ way.”
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Unfortunately for Shumer, we’ve heard warnings like this before. We’ve heard it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over. In the long run, some of these predictions will surely come true — a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me certainly believe they will — but I’m not changing my weekend plans to build a bunker.
The AI industry now has a massive Chicken Little problem, which is making it hard to take dire warnings like this too seriously. Because, as I’ve written before, when an AI entrepreneur tells you that AI is a world-changing technology on the order of COVID-19 or the agricultural revolution, you have to take this message for what it really is — a sales pitch.
Why people are so worried about AI right now
Shumer’s essay claims that the latest generative AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic are already capable of doing much of his job.
“Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”
The post clearly struck a nerve on X. Across the political spectrum, high-profile accounts with millions of followers are sharing the post as an urgent warning.
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To understand Shumer’s post, you need to understand big concepts like AGI and the Singularity. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a hypothetical AI program that “possesses human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can.” The Singularity refers to a threshold at which technology becomes self-improving, allowing it to progress exponentially.
Mashable Light Speed
Shumer is correct that there are good reasons to think that progress has been made toward both AGI and the Singularity.
OpenAI’s latest coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, helped create itself. Anthropic has made similar claims about recent product launches. And there’s no denying that generative AI is now so good at writing code that it’s decimated the job market for entry-level coders.
It is absolutely true that generative AI is progressing rapidly and that it will surely have big impacts on everyday life, the labor market, and the future.
Even so, it’s hard to believe a weather report from Chicken Little. And it’s harder still to believe everything a car salesman tells you about the amazing new convertible that just rolled onto the sales lot.
Indeed, as Shumer’s post went viral, AI skeptics joined the fray.
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It’s not time to panic yet
There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of Shumer’s claims. In the essay, he provides two specific examples of generative AI’s capabilities — its ability to conduct legal reasoning on par with top lawyers, and its ability to create, test, and debug apps.
Let’s look at the app argument first:
I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
Is this impressive? Absolutely!
At the same time, it’s a running joke in the tech world that you can already find an app for everything. (“There’s an app for that.”) That means coding models can model their work off tens of thousands of existing applications. Is the world really going to be irrevocably changed because we now have the ability to create new apps more quickly?
Let’s look at the legal claim, where Shumer says that AI is “like having a team of [lawyers] available instantly.” There’s just one problem: Lawyers all over the country are getting censured for actually using AI. A lawyer tracking AI hallucinations in the legal profession found 912 documented cases so far.
It’s hard to swallow warnings about AGI when even the most advanced LLMs are still completely incapable of fact-checking. According to OpenAI’s own documentation, its latest model, GPT-5.2, has a hallucination rate of 10.9 percent. Even when given access to the internet to check its work, it still hallucinates 5.8 percent of the time. Would you trust a person that only hallucinates six percent of the time?
Yes, it’s possible that a rapid leap forward is imminent. But it’s also possible that the AI industry will rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. And there are good reasons to believe the latter is likely. This week, OpenAI introduced ads into ChatGPT, a tactic it previously called a “last resort.” OpenAI is also rolling out a new “ChatGPT adult” mode to let people engage in erotic roleplay with Chat. That’s hardly the behavior of a company that’s about to unleash AI super-intelligence onto an unsuspecting world.
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This article reflects the opinion of the author.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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Artificial Intelligence
Entertainment
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
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Credit: ChatPlayground AI
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Entertainment
Big Salad’s Birthday Sale
This week only, we’re offering 20% off annual subscriptions to Big Salad, our weekly newsletter (and the #1 fashion/beauty publication on Substack). For $4/month, you will get every issue for a year — packed with fun finds, life realizations, and essays on sex, dating, love, marriage, divorce, parenting, and friendship — plus access to our deep archives.
Last Friday, I wrote about a dating realization I had that changed everything (gift link, free for all). The comments were truly incredible, and I felt really moved by the ability to share relationship (and life) highs and lows with women who really get it. We really are all in this together.
Here are a few more issues you may enjoy…
On sex, dating, relationships, and friendship:
The genius advice my therapist gave me when my marriage ended.
What it felt like to have sex for the first time post-divorce.
How do you know if it’s time to get divorced?
Four ways I’ve learned to deepen friendships.
The book that profoundly changed my friend’s sex life.
Reader question: “I want to talk dirty in bed, but I’m nervous.”
Nine habits that are making my 40s my favorite decade.
On fashion and beauty:
How to style a shirt like a Copenhagen girl.
7 things we spotted people wearing in Paris (plus, two magic Paris itineraries).
13 beauty products we always finish.
Do I get botox or filler? Readers asked, and I answered. 🙂
At age 46, I finally figured out my hair.
Gemma’s #1 drugstore beauty find.
Our 13 favorite swimsuits.
And, most of all, amazing life insights from women we love:
Ashley C. Ford on why poverty makes it hard to figure out what you like.
Anne Helen Petersen’s book-filled island cottage.
Three people share how they changed their careers. Then, three more women share!
Brooke Barker’s great conversation starter.
Hunter Harris tells us what movies and shows to watch right now.
Abbey Nova’s jaw-dropping garden makeover.
Natasha Pickowicz wants you to throw yourself a party.
My sister’s parenting hack that I can’t stop thinking about.
Alison Piepmeyer’s amazing wallpaper before-and-after photos.
15 incredible books to read.
Nine ways Kate Baer is coming out to play in her 40s.
Here’s the discount link for 20% off annual subscriptions, and here’s the Big Salad homepage, if you’d like to check it out. We would love to have you, and thank you so much for your support and readership. Joannaxo
P.S. We also offer 50 comped subscriptions per month for those who’d like to read Big Salad but aren’t in a place to pay for it at the moment. Just email newsletter@cupofjo.com to get on the list. Thank you!
The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem
See results from over 25 AI models side by side with this game-changing tool
