In the opening section of Conrad's novella, the protagonist Charles Marlow recounts his journey into the Belgian Congo, setting a tone of moral ambiguity and impending doom.
The documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse reveals that the filming of Apocalypse Now (a Vietnam War adaptation of the novella) was as chaotic as the story itself. 7. Hearts of Darkness (1)
Marlow visits the Company’s office in a city resembling Brussels, which he calls a "whited sepulchre"—beautiful on the outside but full of death and hypocrisy. This critiques the "civilizing mission" of European powers as a thin veil for brutal profit extraction. In the opening section of Conrad's novella, the