The Darkness Finally Shows Up

The trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince dropped and it looked genuinely dark—not teenager-dark, not moody for the sake of it, but properly weighted, like the filmmakers had finally understood what they were adapting. The cave sequence. Dumbledore’s decline. Draco’s arc, which is more psychologically interesting than any of the films had committed to exploring up to that point.

Half-Blood Prince is the book where things become irreversible. Characters who felt permanent stop being that. The trailer seemed to understand this, and that raised my expectations considerably after some of the middle entries had felt like obligation—expensive, competent, going through the motions of a story they were obligated to tell.

Something in those two minutes suggested they’d finally stopped being careful.