Autumn Lights opens promisingly: As flinty North Atlantic surf crashes against volcanic sand, the camera pans to reveal a verdant green slope meeting the angry sea, a foreboding steely gray sky and a woman walking ominously into the freezing water. Filmed in Iceland, the movie’s first scenes presage an engaging noir thriller in a place where the sun never sets, like a spin-off of Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia buoyed by the trademark atmosphere of Scandinavian cinema.
But none of these promises are fulfilled. Instead, most of the film’s runtime is dedicated to a terribly acted soapy romance plotline. David (Guy Kent) is a travel photographer abandoned in a remote Icelandic cabin when his girlfriend dumps him to return to the US. Lucky her. The nearest home belongs to married couple Marie (Marta Gastini) and Jóhann (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson), whose unceasing vapidity is supposed to be eccentric. David and Marie are attracted to one another, which creates what is supposed to be tension, meant to be fueled by Jóhann’s hobby of carrying his rifle into the woods for target shooting. But the sheer ridiculousness of someone using a high-powered rifle with a top-of-the-line scope to shoot at targets 20 meters away ruins even this dramatic device.
The inept portrayal of Jóhann’s menacing hobby is an apt metaphor for the film. David’s shooting sessions with his camera are every bit as absurdly unconvincing as Jóhann’s with his rifle; he looks like a third-grader who dressed as a photographer for Halloween pretending to take profound pictures of fleeting ecological moments. The plot hinges on the irresistible sex appeal of Maria, but her on-camera presence has none of the charisma, verve or energy to pull this off. That she seems easily resistible is not just Gastini’s failure as an actress, but the writer-director Angad Aulakh’s failure as well.
The film’s dialogue, in all three languages spoken, is jejune to such an extent that it is tempting to posit its superficiality as intentional. The soundtrack is so melodramatic and overdone as to make the viewer wonder if it is terrible on purpose—that is certainly a more convincing explanation than assuming any professional musician would perform the task so poorly. Most of the suspense comes from the anticipation that the film will suddenly improve and/or be revealed as a grand satire. Spoiler alert: it does neither.
Autumn Lights could have been a beautifully-set film noir-without-nightfall where the characters are plagued with insomnia-induced mental limitations—it even sets this plot up. For some inexplicable reason, Aulakh, offers this a character-centered art-film narrative. This could still be effective—masters such as Antonioni and Bergman often foreswore easy genre thrillers for the sake of exploring the human condition. But Aulakh’s characters are boring, one-dimensional and thoroughly unengaging.
The tropes on which the film is constructed are too worn to generate interest. For example, female characters drink wine and talk about men while the men in the next room swig whisky and discuss work. Jóhann makes a supposedly crucial revelation that even a moderately attentive viewer could have seen coming much earlier. This is emblematic of the characters’ absolute absence of character traits. Narratively-speaking, they are hollow. This would be less of a problem had Aulakh made the simpler noir that was there for the making.
Autumn Lights pretends to be a character-driven meditation on what it means to be human. But it is a character-driven film without characters capable of driving a film plot or appealing to a film audience. It is finally empty, vacant and pointless.
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