Martin is the kind of too-perfect child who only really exists in fiction. She warms up to her kid brother, Martin, though, as she has to take him during one of her mother’s depressive episodes. She has commitment and abandonment issues, but Teresa Palmer’s middling performance doesn’t convey that, and as a result she comes off as hostile and dismissive. Lights Out tries too hard to make her cool, down to her walk-up above a tattoo parlor (replete with red neon streaking into her room, reminding one of that Seinfeld episode). She gets better as the movie progresses, but as far as first impressions go, hers isn’t great. One of the film’s earliest stumbling blocks is, unfortunately, its protagonist, Becca. Sandberg is thus able to weaponize the darkness itself, and tell us – and his characters – in no uncertain terms that you are almost never alone in a dark room. Diana only exists in the dark, and as lights are flicked on and off she gets closer, hunched over like a feral cat. Lights Out has one gimmick, but the good thing about is that it works every damn time. It’s here that we meet Paul, whose wife is not doing well, and it’s here that we meet Diana, who wants to ensure that his wife gets worse. The cold open is solid, even if it does work on specious horror-movie logic involving a textile factory that stays open late at night, lit by as few lights as possible. I’m talking scene one/cold open, which isn’t unusual for horror movies what’s unusual about Sandberg’s approach is that he shows us the monster and from then on she’s part of the fabric of the film. Sandberg, made in 2011 – is that it wastes zero time in introducing us to the malevolent entity at its core. One of the pleasures of Lights Out – based on a short film the director, Shazam‘s David F. Subtlety be damned, when it works, it works very well. It is, at times, a potent – and scary – film about the trial of living with someone suffering from psychosis or depression (the metaphor gets a bit muddled at times, if we’re being honest). Lights Out is even less subtle than those other films I mentioned. We use monsters and possessions and hauntings to grapple with those thorny parts of life that don’t make any sense. Most often, these metaphors are not well-hidden, nor are they meant to be. The Shining is about alcoholism, The Babadook about grief, Alien about rape. Horror is a unique genre in that almost every single entry in the canon can be interpreted as a metaphor for something.
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