Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.
The thing that made the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre revolutionary was not the implied blood, but the fact that everything happened in bright daylight. There was no hiding the horror in the shadows. The makers of Lights Out evidently decided that this was a bad idea and created a movie with the opposite premise. Our monster in this film can’t appear in light—it’s light that causes her to disappear. That premise seems really scary on the surface, but when it comes to a film, it means the audience isn’t going to see a damned thing.
On the surface, I get this decision. Having a creature that you can’t really see or get a close look at is scary, and the film is actually smart enough at one point to create a method for us to see the monster in question. Up to that point, though, this is a movie that lives almost literally in the shadows. Scary for the characters in the narrative, but frustrating for the audience trying to see anything.
We’re going to get an inciting incident in a textile factory complete with plenty of mannequins, which is one of the better choices that the film makes. A man named Paul (Billy Burke) is confronted by a creature in the shadows that ultimately kills him when the lights go out. Because this needs to be plot-relevant in more than just “guy gets killed by the monster,” we’re going to learn that Paul is the step-father of Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and the father of Martin (Gabriel Bateman).
This is relevant, because it soon becomes evident that the creature that killed Paul, an apparition named Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey) is somehow connected to Sophie (Maria Bello), Paul’s wife and the mother of both Rebecca and Martin. We’re also going to learn that Martin is terrified at night and is falling asleep in school. Why? Because at night, Diana comes to his house and visits him. This has started happening because Sophie has stopped taking her meds.
Initially, the battle seems to be between Rebecca and Sophie over Martin. Rebecca and her boyfriend Bret (Alexander DiPersia) take Martin but are foiled in this because of CPS (and frankly, they’re lucky they aren’t arrested). It also doesn’t seem to help much, because Diana shows up at Rebecca’s apartment that night, terrorizing everyone.
You know how this is going to go, right? Bret and Rebecca are going to start digging into research and they’re going to find that the troubled Sophie spent a good part of her childhood in institutions where she was befriended by (you know it’s coming) another patient named Diana. We also learn that Diana suffered from a rare condition that caused her to be burned horribly even by ordinary light. And in one of the most ridiculous things ever devised for a film, we also learn that Diana was killed by essentially being turned to ash under bright lights. Oh, and we also learn that evidently Diana was psychic and can “get into people’s heads,” because of course she can.
There’s at least a potentially interesting idea at the heart of Lights Out, and there’s a great moment when Rebecca realizes that a black light allows her to see Diana but that this won’t actually get rid of her. Beyond that, there’s nothing here that makes a lot of sense beyond “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
And that’s one of the problems with Lights Out. There are ideas here, but they don’t seem to be consistent with anything or each other—they are more or less squished together in a semblance of plot that is actually more of a collection of plot points. This could be made into a coherent whole, but we’re not given nearly enough time for that to happen. Lights Out runs a mere 81 minutes, with 4-5 of them taken up by credits. This is a film that desperately needs another 15 minutes of story to tie everything together.
Beyond that, lighting is a significant issue. Because Diana can only exist in the dark and is dispersed by light, we get only glimpses of her until the black light shows up. This actually works really well, because the monster appears only as glimpses until close to the end of the film. But to get there, the film is incredibly dark and feels like it is being lit only with flashlights. If you want me to be scared of something in the shadows, you need to show us the shadows in some respect. Making everything dark doesn’t really show us what is going on.
Lights Out feels like it is cobbled together pieces of other movies. At least you’re not going to have to spend the full day watching it.
Why to watch Lights Out: It’s short.
Why not to watch: There’s not a single thing new here.
No comments:
Post a Comment