YMMV / Out of Darkness

• Anvilicious: The final act slams hard on the Humans Are the Real Monsters and Women Are Wiser messages and does so in a way that many found obnoxiously hamfisted and melodramatic for what had previously been a very restrained and down-to-earth film.
• Ass Pull: The reveal that the "monster" is actually just two neanderthals in costumes borders on nonsensical, as it renders all the extremely strange things the Presence did (moving incredibly fast, being impossibly strong, making monstrous noises unlike anything on Earth, ripping a mammoth to shreds in a way no hominid could, leaving behind some kind of tar-like black slime, etc.) utterly inexplicable. Likewise, the film's attempt to portray them as having been Good All Along and extremely reverent of life doesn't even remotely match their behavior throughout the movie, which was violently territorial at best, hyper-aggressive and malicious at worst.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: General agreement from those who dislike the film and even some who praise it is that the last act is where it falls apart, almost purely because of the absolutely insane amounts of Moral Myopia going on with the Presence/neanderthals and the movie's turn to being borderline misanthropic.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics generally heaped praise on the film, but audiences were significantly more divided on it, with most criticism being directed at the central plot twist and ending.
• Dancing Bear: Much of the interest for the movie for many is mostly due to the sheer novelty of a horror movie set in the Paleolithic, particularly one that's more up to date with modern archeology. Even those who didn't enjoy the final product generally praised the concept as very interesting and rich with potential. Conlang fans were also excited at the prospect of an entirely conlang movie.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending tries to feel bittersweet, but mostly just comes off as bleak, miserable, and uncomfortable, with both tribes dead and Beyah and Heron as the only survivors trying to somehow make it alone. Made even worse by the apparent invocation of an Adam and Eve Plot even though Heron is a literal child and Beyah is a grown woman.
• Faux Symbolism: The leader of the tribe and his pregnant wife are named Adem and Ave, both pronounced like Adam and Eve. And the main protagonist's name sounds similar to Beowulf. The story has absolutely nothing to do with either the Bible or the poem in plot or themes, so it's not really clear what the film is trying to say with that comparison.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Literally any of the death sequences, most memorable probably being Adem getting his face smashed apart, for lack of a better word, and having to be mercy killed.
  • The general atmosphere of the movie, primal and eerie, with the protagonists seeming lost in a world that feels downright eldritch at times. It does a very good job reminding you that this is a time period where man was not the dominant species by any mile.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The reveal that the Presence is actually just a pair of neanderthals dressed up in costumes and the film's clumsy attempt to portray them as Good All Along (when they've been acting like anything but) takes out the horror for a lot of people.
  • Odal becoming convinced that Beyah somehow caused everything bad to happen by having her period is a bit too absurd and on-the-nose to take his subsequent jump off the deep end seriously, let alone find it scary.
• Spiritual Successor: The film feels a lot like an adaption of the classic William Golding's novel The Inheritors, with the prehistoric setting, eerie atmosphere, and being about the displacement of neanderthals by homo sapiens.
• Squick:
  • The group cannibalizing Adem's body.
  • The ending is framed as an Adam and Eve Plot... between a twenty-something woman and an eleven year old boy. At best, the movie seems to be setting up a gender-inverted Wife Husbandry situation.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Even the film's detractors tend to agree that the core premise of a horror story set in prehistoric times is a brilliant idea for a movie and has a lot of potential. They just feel that the movie doesn't do justice to it at all, partly because of it's sudden swerve into moralizing at the end.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The movie is already very dark for the first two acts, but the third act pushes into this territory for some people, with many finding the plot twist and ending downright misanthropic in killing off nearly the entire cast - including the pregnant woman - and depicting the whole conflict as stupid folly born of paranoia and prejudice.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The film's attempts to present the tribe as the real villains and causing everything bad out of superstitious paranoia and violence fails badly for a lot of viewers, who point out that they were absolutely justified in their actions against the Presence (see the trope below) and that they only fall apart because of the former's torment of them.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: One of the most extreme examples in modern cinema. The "monsters"/neanderthals are framed in the ending as if they are a bunch of innocent, noble, kind-hearted people with high regard for life who acted out of either compassion or self-defense, with the film going hard on the Humans Are the Real Monsters angle. This falls laughably flat because the neanderthals are the aggressors for literally the entire film, starting the whole mess by kidnapping a child from camp in the night, later murdering two of their number in cold blood (with one in particular being killed while he's wounded), killing a third when he attacks them in self-defense, and aggravating the situation all the way with their constant harassment of the group. For all that the movie tries to make it out like the neanderthals are the victims, they're the ones who cause everything bad that happens and their fates come off as more Laser-Guided Karma to a lot of viewers. At best, they come off as incredibly stupid, as it's claimed they were supposedly trying to save Heron because they "knew" he would starve with the group, yet there's no explanation as to why they didn't help the entire tribe nor why they would think they could kidnap a child and not face retaliation. Their funeral for Ave also falls very flat when, again, their actions are what led to the situation that killed her, and they certainly don't come off as reverent of life when they're savagely murdering people at no real provocation.