| Director(s) | David F. Sandberg |
| Principal Cast | Teresa Palmer as Rebecca Gabriel Bateman as Martin Alexander DiPersia as Bret Maria Bello as Sophie Alicia Vela-Bailey as Diana |
| Release Date | 2016 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 81 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go Review TLDR/Summary |
The film opens on a burst of white light. As the camera pulls back, the source of this light, a post outside a textile building, is revealed.
A worker in the building, Esther (Lotta Losten), goes to finish off the last of her duties and notices a woman’s silhouette standing in the doorway. She turns on the light to get a better look and the figure disappears. Esther tests the phenomenon by flicking the lights on and off, but immediately stops and runs off when the silhouette moves closer to her during an intermission between the light switches.
She promptly goes to warn her boss, Paul (Billy Burke), who pays little heed to her warning as his focus is preoccupied on a conversation with his step-son, Martin (Gabriel Bateman); Paul tries to assuage Martin’s concerns about some personal affairs and then gets ready to leave the office.
But the silhouetted figure makes her appearance once again and stops him. Suddenly, he finds himself being chased through the warehouse; the creature manages to injure him when in shadow but can’t seem to touch him while he’s under a light source. Unfortunately, the shadow demon seems capable of turning out the lights and manages to kill him under the guise of the dark. She throws his corpse and the scene fades to black – a counterpoint to the intense light that opened the scene. This is a clash between light and dark with deadly stakes. The title card flickers onto the screen, breaking through the darkness and the battle continues.
The camera pulls out from a poster of a vampiric entity, a domesticated rendition of the shadow entity from before. It moves from the poster to a young couple, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and Bret (Alexander DiPersia), getting up from bed. Bret attempts to establish a more explicit relationship with Rebecca but she rejects his attempts. She’s dealing with her own set of issues and as she gazes into the mirror, it’s clear she’s trying to affirm herself. She reassures Bret of her feelings but explains she can’t be as forthright as he is.
As he leaves for the night, the camera pans to Rebecca’s shelving unit and pushes into a photograph of Rebecca and Martin, the boy from opening talking to Paul; the two of them are siblings. The camera pulls back from the photograph, pulling us to a new room – Martin’s. From the photograph of the siblings, we track from additional photographs of Martin with Paul and his mother, Sophie (Maria Bello) to an obituary photo of Paul to Martin sitting on his bed with an expression of fear: a trail of familial darkness coalescing in one scared boy.
He gets up out of his bed to check on his mom and notices her talking to a “Diana” (Alicia Vela-Bailey) hidden in the shadows. He tries to get a better look at her but experiences terror as he feels something inhuman gazing back at him. He hides in his bed, utterly petrified of the situation and unable to close his eyes.
The next day, Martin, suffering from sleep deprivation, is brought to the nurse and calls Rebecca to come pick him up. From there, she learns that Martin has been sleeping in school for days on end, seemingly unable to get any rest at home. Rebecca, with Bret in tow as chauffeur, drives to Sophie’s house to get a handle on the situation. On the way, Martin mentions to Rebecca that Sophie has been speaking to someone named Diana, and a chilling realization sweeps through Rebecca’s eyes. She tells Martin that “Diana” came to their mother a lot during Rebecca’s youth as well – a harbinger of the debilitating depressive phases Sophie commonly went through and is currently going through.
With the context of Diana, Rebecca goes in to confront Sophie and comes to the realization that her mother has fallen into a depraved state, neglecting therapy and medication in favor of communing with Diana in a perpetually dark house with the lights out. The loss of Paul has sent Sophie reeling into an abyss that threatens to take her family along with it. Thus, Rebecca and company are tasked with figuring out a way of to deal with the darkness and the despair that comes along with it.
From this angle, Lights Out is an allegory about depression much in the vein of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, utilizing the trappings of a supernatural horror to explore the way dark thoughts lay roost and come to consume not only oneself but ones entire family as well. As Sophie suffers the people closer to her – Rebecca, Martin, Paul – are forced to deal with and suffer the consequences of depression imagined as supernatural infiltration. By mapping depression to darkness and healing to light, director David F. Sandberg sets the film up for frantic battles where characters have to desperately scramble to find the light in the darkest of situations to keep themselves afloat, nailing the metaphor on its head.
Yet, this reading of the film is rendered formally suspect by the opening sequence at the textile factory. Having Esther deal with Diana makes the latter less a representation of familial grief and more a general demonic entity, and the film leans into this idea repeatedly, having Diana engage in creepy maneuverings typical of something more akin to The Conjuring films. Instead of being tied to Sophie’s thoughts and inner circles, Diana is allowed to be a loose cannon only tangentially tied to depression and is able do whatever the plot needs her to do. This conflict in identity contributes to a disconnect in the narrative and its emotional arcs as the story refuses to commit to either being an horror motivated by intimate family drama or horror motivated by the machinations of an evil creature.
Instead of this combined approach, the story should have committed to one haunted vision over another: either go for a more traditional supernatural demon story with an explicit threat or go for an allegory about grief. As is, the narrative feels like it wants to be the latter story but is forced to deal with intrusions from the former story.
Consequently, even though many of the more shocking sequences are technically competent and incorporate creative uses of lighting to keep the tension palpable, they are transformed from being evocative representations of the characters’ inner turmoil to run-of-the-mill jump-scare sequences. There’s still fun to be had, but it’s a far cry from what the ideas and sense of sequence design should have allowed for.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | Lights Out is a technically proficient horror that knows how to set up a scary sequence but its story is torn between wanting to be a character-driven supernatural allegory and a ghost story about a spectral menace. This lack of direction pervades the narrative and makes it the well-executed scare sequences nothing more than temporary frights with no staying power after watching. |
| Rating | 7.7/10 |
| Grade | B |
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