"Her Dark Past" is an engaging mystery yarn about woman who miraculously recovers from a gunshot wound to the head, only to have amnesia about her past life. She apparently remembers nothing about her caring husband and any details about her family and personal relationships. On the surface, Alice seems like a victim. But is she concealing from others the degree of her memory loss?
The characters as a whole are a motley crew with the oily smile of the husband Peter, the shady character of Darren who does not seem to have a job, and the curious details we learn about Alice's serial marriages with a substantial collection of wedding rings. The key to unraveling the mystery is to determine who shot Alice, and that is the subject that completely stumps the cops.
The well-meaning police detectives, as depicted in the film, are completely incompetent. Detective Martin, who is the lead on the case, puts a tail on Alice and discovers that she is secretly meeting with Darren. Yet the detective fails to confront Alice with the strange meetings and elects not to seek an interview with Darren until the home stretch of the film.
Of course, there would be no film if the police were actually doing their job. The lapses of LAPD lead to a convoluted resolution where we learn about the diabolical scam run by one of the characters. The relationship of Darren and Alice was never fully fleshed out by the detectives, and it was never made entirely clear by the filmmakers either. The final scene was especially gimmicky, and it is difficult to believe that in our high tech world, anyone could evade the long arm of the law simply by donning a wig and developing a phony identification card. In straining credibility, the film loses points in its final five minutes.
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