Lights Out – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by David F. Sandberg

Starring Teresa Palmer, Maria Bello, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia

David F. Sandberg’s feature debut, Lights Out, is an expanded version of a justifiably celebrated 2013 short of the same name.  Sandberg’s device – a spectre that “appears” only in darkness and is immediately banished at the flick of a light-switch – is a clever one, ripe for the kind of innocuous ghost-train jolts the teen horror genre thrives on. Unfortunately, in adding 80 minutes to the running time, Sandberg has saddled himself with a lot of wheel-spinning between set-pieces – each of which might have worked better as a discrete three-minute short of its own.

The story – or rather, the peg upon which the scares are held – involves our heroine Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) returning to her childhood home after concerns are raised about her brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman).  There, Rebecca discovers that her unhinged mother Sophie (Maria Bello) is once again communing with Diana, a belligerent spectre that takes form only in the dark.  Can Rebecca unravel the mystery of Diana and save her brother from her computer-enhanced clutches?  Blink once for yes or twice for no.

The high watermark for this sort of thing is undoubtedly Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2004) – a prototype that Lights Out apes rather too closely when it comes to the backstory of its villain.  However, Verbinski’s film benefitted from the gradual unspooling of a genuinely intriguing mystery – one that was revealed through some of the more imaginative imagery of a post-millennial studio horror film.  Lights Out only has a single device – one that is established forcefully in the opening scenes, but which wears thin when it becomes apparent that subsequent developments to the formula will be merely cosmetic.

The Ring also scored in its casting, with a fiercely committed turn by Naomi Watts that powered the film past its absurdities.  In this department, Lights Out fares surprisingly well.  Palmer is no Watts, but she plays the part with conviction – no small feat when one considers that the 30-year-old actress has been cast as a woman who expresses her inner turmoil by hanging Hot Topic posters reading “Grunge Style” around her absurdly roomy flat.  Maria Bello has never fully got her due in Hollywood – particularly after her striking turn in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) – but she always gives her best shot, and this is no exception.  The fact that Bello and Palmer make for a credible mother-daughter pairing even manages to generate a certain amount of poignancy, entirely apart from the Eric Heisserer’s hackneyed script.  The rest of the cast are spottier.  Alexander DiPersia doesn’t have a single credible line as Rebecca’s sympathetic dreamboat boyfriend, and Bateman’s tortured over-acting as the child in peril speaks volumes of Sandberg’s inexperience.

Sandberg has an undeniably strong visual sense, but he isn’t done many favours by Heisserer, who tends to drop big lardy globs of exposition in the form of conveniently discovered audio tapes, or offer reams of backstory handily scrawled on walls.  The sprayed-on subtext of Lights Out is ropier still – and all the harder to ignore for its blaring overstatement.  Transparently, the original short has been padded out to feature length as an allegory for mental illness – specifically the experience of living with somebody else’s depression.  This would be well and good if the film had anything remotely insightful to offer on the subject but, naturally, it does not – and its blockheaded attempts at allegory grow more irritating as it progresses, before arriving at a conclusion that might be offensive to any viewers susceptible enough to take it seriously.  It’s not clear why the filmmakers have tried to ‘legitimise’ Sandberg’s ghoulish parlour-trick by making it Really About Something, but – whatever the reason – they might have fared better had they doubled down on the scares and left allegory for those who actually have something to say.