Lights Out (2016)

I watched and enjoyed David F. Sandberg’s short film of the same name a while back, so I was cautiously optimistic about the feature length piece. 

The concept alone implies the jump scares - there’s something haunting a family and it can only move in the dark - so if that’s not your thing, this movie won’t work for you. For me, it was alright. The reliance on jump scares was spaced out enough that it didn’t feel excessive, but it did become a predictable vehicle for scares and lost the efficacy that it had in the short. Teresa Palmer barely held the movie together, but the story did feel like a looser attempt to keep a cool idea going by stringing together tropes and horror movie cliches. The longer it went on, the weaker it felt.

It’s not revolutionary, but it’s a fun horror movie with all of the requisite themes (the unseen, familial bonds, supernatural vs.skepticism, mental instability). It takes a few shortcuts to make the points it wants to make, but it does what it sets out to do and is pretty accomplished for a feature length debut. I’d be curious to see what Sandberg can do given continued support by the big guns (like James Wan) as he continues to mature as a filmmaker. There’s an indication of a real skill for evoking atmosphere and crafting effective scares, which is probably the roughest thing to find in horror at the moment.

Rating: 5.5/10 - I didn’t really dwell on the mental health depictions in this movie, but the underlying ideas about treating mental health issues irked me a little too much to really get into it. Fine, but not something I’d go back to.