Reel Review: Brave the Dark (2025)

“Brave the Dark” is a poignant true story of resilience, redemption, and the profound impact a single caring teacher can have on a lost soul.

The world is a dumpster fire. I don’t need to tell you that. There’s no shortage of monstrosity and enough real-life horror to make us question our faith in humanity.

I spend a lot of time writing about the dark side of human nature.  As a horror fan, I’m captivated by the devastating, horrific, often gut-wrenching explorations of the world’s evil and mankind’s worst tendencies.

Still, as much as we are capable of such ugliness, we have an equivalent capacity for love, goodness, and redemption. We humans are complicated and messy. The world repeatedly brings us to our knees, but we keep getting back up.

Brave the Dark is a heartwarming story that may satiate horror fans, but it’s an excellent palate cleanser if you need an escape from these dark and dangerous times.

Our formative years shape us and help define the trajectory of our lives. Yet so many children have nothing to hold on to, no one to guide them, and no way to navigate the treachery of life. If anyone other than a parent significantly impacts a child’s life and gives them a light in the dark, it will likely be a teacher.

These hugely influential forces can make all the difference in a struggling young person’s life, but we treat them with little regard—such disrespect that borders on disdain.

Brave the Dark is the true story of one caring teacher who touched so many lives, but no life more than a wayward teen named Nathan Deen.

That teacher is Stan Deen (played by the director’s brother, Jared Harris). The teen, who begins the film as Nathan Williams (IT’s Nicholas Hamilton), is an orphan with a sweet but haunted face—looking like the love child of Nicholas Hoult and Freddie Highmore.

(The real-life Nathan Deen shares writing credits on the film with director Damian Harris, along with Dale G. Bradley, Lynn Robertson Hay, and John P. Spencer.)

Stan is a beloved teacher in a small-town Pennsylvania high school who is kind and soft-spoken with a big heart and lots of genuine love for his kids. He seems to know everyone in town and has clearly left a lasting impression on every student he’s taught.

After getting arrested at school for breaking and entering, Stan discovers that Nathan is homeless and has been sleeping in his car, a fact that he’s managed to keep hidden from his classmates. His parents are dead, and his guardian grandparents seem entirely disinterested in his well-being.

Where the world sees a troublemaker, Stan sees a boy with promising potential who desperately needs some love and support—and a chance at a normal life.

He convinces the school to let Nathan stay enrolled and convinces a judge to let Nathan live with him (with his grandparents all too happy to sign away their rights).

The rest of the film is a journey of self-discovery, healing, and redemption that plays out as you might imagine but is made more impactful by the film’s factual basis.

It’s written like a sentimental, feel-good family film about hope and second chances, but the familiar beats are grounded in genuine sincerity. There’s gravitas, too; the movie doesn’t shy away from revealing (via flashbacks) Nathan’s dark past to show us just how much the cards were stacked against him.

Nathan struggles to trust, wrestling with tendencies to self-sabotage and push others away before they have a chance to hurt him.

The performances are stellar, and it’s easy to get swept up in this simple but powerful story of kindness and how much a single person can change your entire life.

The film was funded by Christian movie studio Angel Studios, but it’s not preachy in its approach. Rather than pushing a religious agenda, it wisely chooses to focus on the qualities we all wish truly defined Christianity: charity, compassion, unconditional love, and forgiveness.

In a world where so much horror is committed in the name of religion—and so much focus is placed on condemning the “sin” and ostracizing the sinner, it’s nice to see a religious studio focus on their stated mission to “amplify light” so we can all be better equipped to brave the dark.