Brave the Dark
Brave the Dark
6.673%94%
Haunted by torturous childhood memories, Nate Williams finds himself engulfed in darkness. When his drama teacher, Mr. Deen bails him out of jail and takes him in, Nate must confront his past before it leads to his own destruction.
CrossCutCritic reviewedApril 30, 2025
The Teacher Who Stayed When Everyone Else Left
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Some stories come with light.
Others come with shelter.
Brave the Dark is the latter.
It doesn’t try to dazzle you.
It offers you a place to sit down in the storm.
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Based on the true story of teacher Stan Deen and a student named Nate Busko,
the film opens in a familiar kind of American night —
not the dramatic kind, but the quiet night of forgotten people.
A high school hallway.
A kid sleeping in a car.
A man with just enough kindness left in him to ask the right question at the right time.
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Jared Harris plays Stan — a teacher, a mentor, a flawed man still haunted by his own shadows.
Nicholas Hamilton plays Nate — a teenager running out of places to run.
Their connection begins in small gestures:
a sandwich, a ride, a room.
But what unfolds isn’t charity.
It’s covenant.
Stan doesn’t just offer Nate help.
He offers presence.
And in a world that weaponizes abandonment, presence is radical.
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This is where the theology starts to hum beneath the script.
Because grace doesn’t always come dressed in miracles.
Sometimes it wears a windbreaker.
Sometimes it’s awkward, and tired, and unsure what to say.
But it shows up anyway.
And in that showing up, something cruciform happens.
Not clean.
Not simple.
But holy.
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Stan becomes a kind of Christ-figure — not because he’s perfect,
but because he refuses to turn away.
He bears another’s burden.
Not abstractly.
Not metaphorically.
But in grocery bills, late-night arguments, bailouts, and listening when he has no answers.
He enters Nate’s chaos.
He absorbs the cost.
And he stays.
This is what the cross looks like in a high school parking lot:
not victorious, but faithful.
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Nate’s trauma isn’t resolved in a tidy arc.
He lashes out.
He crumbles.
He nearly walks back into the darkness that shaped him.
But something has changed.
Because love, once received — even just once —
has a way of haunting you gently.
It leaves fingerprints on your future.
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Brave the Dark is slow, quiet, a little rough around the edges.
But that’s what makes it work.
It doesn’t glorify suffering.
It doesn’t rush the redemption.
It lets you feel the weight of what it costs to carry another human being — and the holiness of doing it anyway.
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There’s a moment near the end — no spoilers — where you realize Stan isn’t Nate’s savior.
He’s just his witness.
And maybe that’s all the cross ever asks us to be.
Not heroes.
Not fixers.
Just people willing to stay long enough for grace to do what only grace can do.