Within the film Amber Road, “Amber Road” refers to a “highly profitable online black market” on the dark web but the film focuses on a site on Amber Road in which individuals not only can watch people tortured to death, they can make requests of what is done to those people.

A circle of individuals with nicknames related to classical culture (Pluto, Atropos, Erebus, etc.) operate the Amber Road.  The film begins with them hatching a plot at the behest of the unseen Erebus, almost suggesting the witches of Macbeth (tangentially, the producers, writer and director of this film have also done their own film version of that play, so the effect may be intentional).

At the heart of the film, James (William McNamara) and Mary (Janet Wang) have been kidnapped and are slowly being tortured to death on Amber Road. At times both they and their captors wear domino masks.  They are tortured in great detail, and here is where the limits of the special effects budget are revealed.  More could have been done with so much less – less obvious stage blood, less bloodletting, less histrionics. As they are tortured, and the police seek them, and the classical cult meets the characters offer lots of explanations and moustache twirling speeches in lieu of plot or action.  The film thus feels like it reels from community theatre Saw scenes to extended monologues and exchanges that do not really move the plot (such as it is) forward.

I am a huge fan of low budget filmmaking, but in order to do it well one needs must make a virtue of the limits and use the audience’s imaginations. There are some really unique ideas here.  I particularly enjoyed the idea that the torturers cut off a woman’s thumbs and then give her a gun and a bullet, telling her if she can load and fire the gun she can shoot one of them.  Thumbless, she cannot, but she tries for a long time, one of the few times when the length of a torture scene worked to the film’s advantage because the torture was more psychological than an obvious special effect.

The good ideas in Amber Road, however, are surrounded by much more familiar ideas.  You’ve seen it before and you’ve seen it better. Feardotcom, the Saw films, Unfriended: Dark Web do similar things, which is a shame because there are interesting ideas and a few good performances here, but they disappear under the weight of the film. Grand ideas, small budget, and a mixed bag of talent results in a film with promise that does not deliver on it.  Perhaps the biggest problem is overwriting.  Characters tell rather than show or tell then show, but the showing is never the equal of the telling.  Lot of talking heads, but very little is really said. I have a suspicion one could remove half the dialogue and both the film and the plot would improve.

By the time the audience learns the truth behind things, we have long since stopped any emotional involvement in Amber Road.  A good effort by the folks who made it, but in the end it doesn’t pay off.

4 out of 10