Lights Out

Cert: 15A. Now showing Although it could have been conceived at a red light, this rather effective horror debut from one David F Sandberg gets great mileage from its thin premise. The Swede came to notoriety in 2013 with a two-and-a-half-minute horror short about a woman who sees a gruesome figure in her hallway when she switches out the light. She switches it on and the figure is gone. She checks it again with the light on and there the ghoul is again. And so on.

With the big studios on board, Sandberg here gets to expand his brainchild to a trim and flab-free 81 minutes, an elongated bump in the night that puts the effort in places where many horror films skimp (anchoring performances, real dialogue, credible protagonists).

Kristen Stewart lookalike Teresa Palmer (Triple 9, Warm Bodies) is granite-strength in the lead as Rebecca, a gothy twenty-something who discovers that young half-brother Martin is experiencing similar visions and nightmares to the ones she was once beset with in the family home. Their mum Sophie (Maria Bello) has a history of mental illness, and is acting very strangely indeed following the opening murder of Martin’s father. Rebecca is certain the family home is hosting a grisly lodger, one that likes curtains drawn and lights switched off.

None of this is new territory – Lights Out works best as Rebecca investigates the ghoul while protecting Martin and facing her own demons too. You wouldn’t call it the most original piece of horror cinema but it is admirably inventive in those spaces between the obligatory generic tropes of shrill sound design, creaking hinges, and the inevitable descent into the basement.