New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

This means she’s also tasked with doing most of the movie’s heavy lifting as far as audience investment; Palmer is functional enough as Teresa, but her character isn’t called upon to really factor into the story until the very end. Bateman makes more of an impression, but his performance is full of the expressions and tics and intonation that belie an unmodulated performer. This should be expected (he just hit double digits and he’s only been acting since 2014), and the way it takes us out of the moment really isn’t down to any fault of the actor’s own. That, somewhat unfortunately, must go to David F. Sandberg. This is his first feature, and he reveals himself to be a promising craftsman of the horror frame; the second appearance of Diana (right after the “light switch” sequence from the trailers and the original short) is a terrific use of light and shadow, and it showcases one of the movie’s best visual tricks: the glint of light reflecting off of eyes in the middle of an otherwise indistinct outline.

He also doesn’t try too hard to score an atmospheric or creepy moment, which I will also put a checkmark in the plus column for; he frequently doesn’t try hard enough, and that’s a different story. There are moments like that early scene, and the final act (a moment at the movie’s climax, involving an dimly-lit police officer in a doorway, is sincerely frightening), but in between there are a lot of passages that seem to just sit there and wait for something to follow up with. I attribute that to Sandberg’s greenery, in part; the blocking and camera angles in these sequences are stationary and functional but unexciting.

And Sandberg, for all that his heart is in the right place, can’t help but give us a portion of backstory conveyed by filtered, scratchy, old-film digital work, which a) recalls earlier films that have done the same thing with more precision and better audiovisual design, notably 2006’s Silent Hill; and b) only serves to undercut the menace of the present-day Diana to a degree that really wasn’t needed. We’ve already been given enough information to know that she/it can appear wherever and whenever she wants to; the movie cheats in a familiar way by not clarifying what she/it can and can’t do under different circumstances (sometimes light just makes her disappear or phase out of existence; sometimes it seems to burn her physically).

That elliptical nature and style of storytelling, so endemic to the proceedings in a horror short, still ultimately prevails: we are given just enough context to remain nervous and jumpy whenever there is a dark corner of the frame, which is almost all the time. Like It Follows from last year, this is a simple narrative given the texture of a waking nightmare by its antagonist and surroundings. It is not as pervasively unmanning as that film was when it revved up, but it’s in the same ballpark. Lights Out will probably work just as well on the senses on a home screen with proper sound as it does in theaters, and this is in several ways a compliment. It is not built to entertain a sequel and I cannot imagine what one might do besides further deconstruct, demystify, and declaw the menace of this film’s presence…but on its own, it’s a tidy offering of late-summer horror cinema, giving us the promise of potential in its filmmaker. I like seeing that in a film.

Continued:       1       2