Are you afraid of the dark? It’s plying on this age old fear that has
kept the horror industry in business, whether it be malevolent spirits
or machete wielding serial killers it’s the fear of what is hidden in
the shadows that both terrifies us but also intrigues us. First time
director
David F. Sandberg made
an internet splash with the short film of the same name, which he
created along with his wife Lotta Losten, and drew the eye of producers
Lawrence Grey who thought the idea would make for an great horror movie. Producer
James Wan knew that turning a three minute short into a feature length film wouldn’t be easy, and as is the plot
is fairly thin, but mostly they pull it off.
The
short film dealt with a woman who noticed a dark silhouette in the
shadows whenever she turned off the light, but when the light is turned
back on the figure vanishes. The movie opens with the same basic concept
as we see a woman (
Lotta Losten
who played the part in the original short) working in the gloomy
hallways of a textile warehouse, when the motion activated lights turn
off she spots the silhouette of a woman with monstrously long fingers,
but upon waving her arms and the lights coming back on the strange woman
is gone. This goes on for a bit as this mysterious being hounds the
poor woman, who vainly tries warning her boss Paul (
Billy Burke), but he’s to wrapped up in his own problems to take her seriously.
Needless to say it doesn’t end well for him.
We are then introduced to Paul's stepdaughter Rebecca (
Teresa Palmer) who has commitment issues, refusing to acknowledge that her lover Bret (
Alexander DiPersia),
who she has been exclusively seeing and sleeping with for eight months,
is her boyfriend and just someone she has sex with on a regular basis.
She is alerted by her half-brother Martin’s (
Gabriel Bateman)
school that the kid has been falling asleep in class, and that her
mother has not been answering the phone. Turns out Rebecca's mother
Sophie (
Maria Bello)
suffers from depression, she even spent time in a mental institution as
a child, and the recent death of her husband Paul has apparently sent
her down the rabbit hole again. Rebecca takes Bret to her place, an
apartment above a tattoo parlor, and that night she to encounters a
strange figure that only becomes visible in the dark.
The nice thing about
Lights Out
is that it doesn’t waste time with our lead characters trying to
convince other people that there is a ghost haunting them, having been
attacked in her room Rebecca immediately believes Martin that this
ghost, who he calls Diana, has been living with him and his mom for some
time now. That the mysterious Diana is the reason for Rebecca’s father
disappearing, and her running off to live on her own, just adds credence
to what the kid tells her. The ghost also having carved her name into
Rebecca’s wooden floor, causing a flash back where she remember the
nasty entity ruining a picture she drew as a child, kind of seals the
deal.
Ghosts can be such dicks.
On the negative side
Lights Out
is insanely predictable, I was spouting out exact lines of dialogue
just before the characters in the movie uttered them. Almost every
horror movie cliché in the book is ticked off one by one during the
films running time, and of course the idiots in this movie will wander
around the dark house alone for no bloody reason. When all the lights in
the house go out she even leaves her little brother asleep in bed,
while she goes off to investigate, with only a little candle as
protection. We then have to endure Rebecca stalking down dark hallways,
with a hand crank powered flashlight, as she looks for the cause of the
power outage. Then there is Bret who we see wandering around outside
for some unearthly reason, and of course poor Martin has to face off
against Diana with his stupid little candle because he woke up to find
his sister missing.
“Care for a light?”
David
F. Sandberg’s talent as director is key in overcoming the scripts
shortcomings, the last act is basically our heroes trying to use various
method of illumination to keep the creature at bay, and the mystery as
to who or what Diana is falls into the category of generic and
unimportant, but what really sells the movie is the cast who all do
fantastic jobs. You feel their helplessness, you pity Sophie and the
mental issues she so desperately wants to overcome, if only the
malevolent Diana would let her, and you sit at the edge of your seat as
good finally confronts evil. At eighty minutes in length the movie does
not wear out its welcome, Sandberg clearly knows how far he can push a
rather thin premise, and the result is a taught little ghost story that
has enough originality to offset the numerous clichés and cheap jump
scares.
“Boo!”
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