It stars Nicolas Cage as an ex-CIA agent suffering from dementia who is on a personal mission to track down and kill a terrorist who had tortured him two decades earlier.

Dying of the Light was released theatrically and through VOD formats by Lionsgate on December 5, 2014 to extremely negative reviews from film critics.

Evan Lake is a highly decorated veteran CIA agent and Intelligence Star recipient reduced to a desk job at Langley with his protege and close friend Milton "Milt" Schultz.

Twenty-two years ago during an op in Africa, Lake was captured by terrorist Muhammad Banir and tortured by having his head repeatedly bashed and having his ear mutilated.

As a result of the trauma he sustained under torture, Lake is now suffering from early stage frontotemporal dementia, and his boss considers him a liability to the agency.

The drugs are for an anonymous Kenyan client, and are coming from a University of Bucharest clinic run by Professor Dr. Iulian Cornel.

In Bucharest, the men meet Michelle Zubarain, a former journalist, possible agent, and Lake's one-time love, who has information about Cornel providing the drug Banir needs.

While Lake takes the money, drugs, and passport from the professor in order to impersonate him in Kenya, Milt catches Aasim and slits his throat, effectively preventing him from contacting Banir.

In January 2010, Nicolas Winding Refn was attached to direct Paul Schrader's script, with Harrison Ford to star as lead.

"[11] This post was accompanied by photographs of himself, Cage, Yelchin, and Refn wearing a T-shirt carrying the "non-disparagement" clause of their contracts which prohibits them from criticizing the film in question prior to, during, and in a period immediately following a project's release.

[citation needed] On December 8, 2014, the film's director of photography, Gabriel Kosuth, explained in a guest column on Variety.com that his color-significant cinematography had been digitally altered and that he "was denied the possibility to accomplish in post-production what is any cinematographer's duty: 'assuring that what audiences will see on cinema and television screens faithfully reflects the "look" intended by the director' (according to the American Cinematographer Manual)".

[12] In 2017 Schrader revisited his first cut and, working from DVD copies of the workprint, created a rough version of the film that approximates his initial vision under the new title Dark.