David F. Sandberg’s low-budget 2013 short “Lights Out” is deeply creepy yet so modestly scoped that it’s basically a horror haiku, a quick bite whose impressions linger long after its three-minute runtime. It centers on a woman alone in her apartment, and whenever she turns off the lights, a ghoulish figure appears before her in the darkness; she flips the lights back on, and it disappears. She flips the switch up and down multiple times, squinting in the dark and never sure of what she’s seeing, until it’s too late. The premise is simple, but it’s perfectly executed, tapping into some of our most instinctive fears—darkness, intruders, the unknown, our own minds—with remarkable brevity. This full-length expansion, the identically named Lights Out, takes this concept and stretches it past its limit, repeating the same basic jump-scare sequence and introducing a psychoanalytical framework that nullifies the urgent, primal fears felt in the original.
Part of what makes the first Lights Out such a success is the sense of mystery that permeates the imagery. We don’t know what this figure is, or why it’s preying on this particular person, or even who this particular person is, but that’s all beside the point. What matters most is the sensation of feeling like you’re in danger, but never being able to pinpoint where the dangers resides, which Sandberg locates in shadowy cinematography and precise framing. The film also conveys looming feelings of self-doubt as the woman constantly second-guesses herself, flipping the lights on and off because she can’t trust what she sees in front of her. Paranoia, dread and helplessness seep in. These ideas lend themselves to a great horror film, but they aren’t the ones Sandberg pursues here. The film is his feature debut, and like a lot of first-time filmmakers, he has a tendency to overthink. Rather than pursue what makes this story so scary, he opts to explain why it’s scary, and the film quickly falls apart around him.
The screenplay, written by Eric Heisserer, opens with an extended sequence that’s essentially the same, beat-for-beat, as the original short—it even features the same actress, Sandberg’s wife Lotta Losten. This time, the action is set in a textile factory and also features the despondent Paul (Billy Burke), whose young son, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), is begging him to come home because mom is acting weird. Before he can head out, Paul is attacked and killed by the shadowy ghoul, his body left bloody and mangled on the factory floor. From there, we follow Martin and his estranged older half-sister, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), who left the house years earlier after a falling out with their unstable mother, Sophie (Maria Bello), and now avoids adulthood while living in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood and hanging out with her nice-guy sex partner/hopeful boyfriend, Bret (Alexander DiPersia). In the script’s one clever twist, it’s the creepy, pale mom, not the creepy, pale kid, who seems to have an imaginary friend coming to life in the shadows, and it’s up to Martin and Rebecca—and poor Bret—to rid the monster from their lives.
But before they can do that, Lights Out spins its wheels explaining just what exactly the monster is. Thanks to a series of clues conveniently laid out for the characters, we learn about Diana, a troubled young girl from Sophie’s past stint in a mental hospital, where she was treated for depression as a child. Not only was Diana ultrasensitive to light, she had an evil streak and violent tendencies, and she was highly possessive of Sophie, leading some of the doctors to note how she seemed to be “in her head.” After Diana died in a weird, potentially supernatural accident at the hospital, Sophie was released and eventually got better, but it seems neither Diana nor her depression ever left her.
Sandberg spends so much time on character backstory and exposition that the narrative quickly loses momentum. What’s worse, even after the story’s “house rules” are thoroughly cemented, they never quite make sense, as Diana seems to exist in multiple places at once and also seems to have a physical shape despite being a ghost, or an extension of Sophie’s psychosis, or whatever. The filmmakers seem to think of Diana as a metaphor, although it’s not clear what for, exactly. She could symbolize familial dysfunction, or Sophie’s depression, or Rebecca’s fear of responsibility; she could represent all three and a lot more, but in imbuing the figure with endless significance as opposed to allowing it to exist in mystery and sublimity, the possibility of true terror—and true art—never materializes.
Like James Wan’s other horror properties, Lights Out has a physical dimension that proves welcome amid Hollywood’s CGI glut. Appropriately enough, cinematographer Marc Spicer seems to be the only person aware of the film’s potential. The best scenes in Lights Out operate in almost complete darkness, but he manages to reveal varying degrees of light and contrast from the blackened interiors, of which there are a total of two. (The film unfolds almost entirely within Rebecca’s small apartment and Sophie’s L.A. mansion.) He locates nuances in pitch-black hallways and darkened doorways, sometimes illuminated by a dull lightbulb or iPhone screen, and the best shots have you frantically guessing what could lie in the shadows.
Unfortunately, Sandberg is there to reveal it all, spelling things out so legibly yet so sloppily that the film feels simultaneously overwritten and underdetermined. Ultimately, Lights Out seems to be a consideration of extreme mental illness and its effect on the family, and like the maternally-minded horror hit The Babadook, it places motherhood in a place of utter prominence, verging on martyrdom. The climax coincides with a moment of sacrifice that surely looked heroic on the page but in reality seems to condone one of the most unfortunate and truly tragic outcomes of major depression. The ending leaves the impression that Lights Out, in addition to being thematically overstuffed and uninspired in its generic conventions, might also be socially and morally irresponsible.
The post Lights Out appeared first on Spectrum Culture.