Ondřej Moravec, the director and protagonist of this virtual reality experience, has suffered from depression since puberty. Here he transcribes what he struggles to articulate with words alone: his experience of this illness, from the episodes of crisis to the solutions he's found to help him live with it. By recreating his environment and emotions as a stylized animation, he invites his audience to use their voices – like him – to hum, sing or shout as a way of repelling this terrible sensation of "darkening" that threatens to engulf him at any moment.
Darkening is a cathartic work that helps us to better understand the difficult moments experienced by the many people suffering from this condition.
Laurent Kempf