This terrifying idea slowly flickers out
Lights Out ramps up tension, but fails to deliver on its frightening premise
Lights Out reveals its finest idea only a few minutes into its opening scene. A middle-aged woman is closing up shop one night at some kind of textile factory. She leans into an empty room and switches off the light, and in the dark sees the silhouette of an ominous figure, dimly back-lit by the moonlight pouring in through another doorway.
Spooked, the woman flips the light back on: no figure. She turns it off again: there it is. On: nada. Off: voila. The rhythm accelerates, and tension builds, and someone in the audience actually moans, loudly, because they can’t bear it anymore. It’s a really wonderfully agonizing moment — the sort of thing that lurks in the amygdala, and makes you wince just to think of it later. Introducing that into the popular imagination is a modest but applaudable accomplishment.
Most movies aren’t lucky enough to have one good image. But one good image does not a movie make. Lights Out makes the most of its fortune with what a composer might call variations on a theme: It takes its one good image and repeats it, with mild revisions. Toward the end of the first act the silhouetted boogeyman appears and vanishes in the intermittent glow of a neon light that turns on and off on a timer — not bad. Later there’s a hand-cranked flashlight that shuts off every few minutes, which provoked a mass groan in the theatre, and there are some clever bits with candles and iPhone screens and, at one point, a car’s headlights, which prompted spontaneous applause. It isn’t easy, devising credible reasons for lights to flicker. You can sense the strain.
Lights Out, you will not be surprised to learn, started life as a three-minute short; it’s been expanded into a feature by its original director, David F. Sandberg, with help from producer James Wan and screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who has made a career punching up and rewriting lucrative horror properties.
The film is 81 minutes long — about 70 of which are desperately tedious.
The hero of the film, a girl named Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), has been furnished with a backstory, a boyfriend (Alexander DiPersia) and, in a gesture of hopeless overextension, an honest-to-goodness flashback, all of which have the superfluous feel of fan fiction, if indeed you can foresee this film inspiring fans.
A boogeyman who only kills in the dark isn’t particularly interesting as a concept. It seems a premise more worthy of a oneoff X-Files episode than a feature film. And of course, Lights Out runs into trouble when it’s obliged to do anything more than have its monster stand still. Expository dialogue has a distinctly scrawled-on-napkin quality; the dimensions of the boogeyman’s powers aren’t at all clear; musty explain-all references to mental hospitals, fateful experiments and a malevolent problem child abound. Worse still is how the film follows through on fright.
It has a fabulous idea of what it looks like when the boogeyman is coming to get you. It has no idea what to do when the boogeyman finally gets there.