I’ve waited
five days to write this. This movie hit me pretty hard for personal
reasons. A friend of mine with bipolar disorder passed away
tragically a few years. While I’m not a psychologist to assess the
accuracy, I can say that the portrayal here seemed close enough to me
to have me fighting back tears. That makes me a bit uncertain how
objective my review will be when I describe this film as impactful,
but I will do my best anyway.
Lights Out
honestly looked like another gimmicky monster movie. A girl with an
allergy to light died in a horrible experiment, and now her ghost is
attacking people in the dark. The trailer looked cheesy as hell.
Instead of a
formula monster movie, however, I got a horror film that plays around
with the conventions of storytelling. This is the endpoint in a
family drama that has played out over many years and two generations.
We’re told about things that have already happened in vague terms,
and get flashbacks from people who did not witness the events that
are being described. This isn’t a film that answers all its
questions.
Our main
character is a young woman named Rebecca who was raised by a mentally
ill mother named Sophie. As a child the mother had a “friend”
named Diana who died in the aforementioned horrible way. Whenever
the mother stops taking her medication her “friend” begins to
manifest, showing violent tendencies to anyone who attempts draw
Sophie away from her. While Rebecca has long abandoned Sophie, she
now has a younger brother named Martin who she feels she must protect
as Diana begins to surface again.
This isn’t a
great movie because it’s flawless, but because it’s able to make
you not care about its flaws. There are certainly major gaps in
logic. If Diana can manifest anywhere dark why can’t she just
appear in Rebecca’s stomach and kill her from the inside? If
Rebecca cared so much about her younger brother, why didn’t she
discuss the threat of Diana with Sophie while she was well? Why does
she literally leave her brother in a dark room at one point? We’re
all perfectly prepared to forgive these problems because the
characters are strong.
The only flaw
that does bother me is Rebecca’s boyfriend Bret. This isn’t
because he’s a bad character, but because he’s a good character
who’s woefully underused. He’s a force of stability and support
to Rebecca, as Rebecca fights between love of her brother and her own
desire for freedom. The problem is that the filmmakers apparently
wanted to subvert the cliché of “I don’t believe you, but I’ll
support you until we can prove it isn’t real.” Without this
cliché, Bret has nothing to do until he actually sees the ghost, and
for a good twenty minutes of the film he barely utters a word while
following along with Rebecca and Martin through the plot.
This movie is
quite short, so if I were to make a perfect cut it would include
another ten or twenty minutes of scenes with Bret around the middle
of the movie. Granted, such scenes would likely be unnecessary to
the plot, but this is a film that has room for some expansion. It
was based on a short film already, so they could always stretch it a
bit more.
Do I recommend
this film? Absolutely! Or at least to anyone who isn’t going to
be triggered by a disturbing portrayal of the pain of mental illness.
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