Review of Lights Out (2016) by John C — 22 Oct 2016

You can just feel how much LIGHTS OUT wants to be this ferocious roller coaster ride, and at times it really does click and come close to that, but there are also times when the limitations of the premise make themselves known and felt in pronounced ways.

On the positive front, the movie is very well made - slickly shot and with characters that aren't idiots in the way horror characters can often be. The character work is (mostly) interesting, and the decision to make the story ultimately about a quite dysfunctional mother/daughter/son dynamic gives the proceedings a bit of emotional heft that is unexpectedly effective.

In terms of the scares, the movie is jump city, and said jumps are too often accompanied by irritating orchestral stabs and explosions on the soundtrack, a current horror trope which is getting really old for me (it smacks of the filmmakers being lazy or insecure about their abilities to generate scares and jumps without jarring and surprising musical stings).

The movie's weakest element, though, is actually kind of the fact that it exists at this length at all - the idea worked like gangbusters as a short, and I don't think much (if anything) was gained by expanding to feature film status.

The filmmakers try really hard to give the big spooky moments some variety - and they do achieve that to a basic extent - but at the end of the day there's only so much that can be done with the idea of a specter that can't be seen in the light.

I can't pretend I didn't enjoy the movie, because I did, and I think it's a fine little horror flick... but that's all.