[yasr_overall_rating]
When her little brother, Martin, experiences the same events that once tested her sanity, Rebecca works to unlock the truth behind the terror, which brings her face to face with an entity that has an attachment to their mother, Sophie.
“Lights Out” feels like it came from the John Carpenter school of filmmaking because director David F. Sandberg, surprisingly in his feature-film directorial debut, delivers old-school chills and thrills that are reminiscent of early Carpenter. The story and the characters presented to us we’ve seen a million times before but Mr. Sandberg has the nerve, the audacity, to change the horror formula we have all come to know and love, a precept that has been around since the dawn of time, well, the beginning of motion pictures at least, and does a complete 180. People that would normally be introduced in a scary movie, those clichéd, hackneyed, stereotypical characters that never make it to the closing credits, here, survive all the way through. And just when you are ready for them to become annoying and bothersome, hoping that they will indeed, wind up on the end of a machete or meat cleaver, here, they become likable and appealing, forcing you to sit back and wonder just how the hell the film is going to play out. And I can think of no better way to watch a scary movie than having no earthly idea as to what is going to happen next. And to whom.
Young Martin (Gabriel Bateman) lives with his estranged mother Sophie (Maria Bello), in a house that looks exactly like the house from “Insidious,” thank you James Wan. At night, he can hear her talking to a woman named Diana but when he tries to get a look at her, he can see no one. Thinking that his mother is losing it, he approaches her in her room one night and in the shadows, he can see two eyes staring back at him. The figure gives chase and he runs back to his room and leaves his lights on all night, quickly realizing that she cannot come out of the shadows. The next day in school, he is afraid to go back home and calls his sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) to come pick him up. Estranged from their mother herself, she agrees to let him stay with her for a few days but when he mentions the name Diana, and the scratching noises she makes at night, Rebecca informs Martin that the same thing happened to her when she was younger, hence her moving out of the house.
After doing a little research, Rebecca discovers that her mother had been admitted to a sanitarium when she was a teenager and while there, became friends with a strange young girl named Diana, who suffered from a rare skin condition that kept her inside and away from direct sunlight. After the doctors subjected her to a new treatment, hoping to better understand her condition, it went horribly wrong and as a result, she died. Now her spirit is connected to Sophie, the only friend she ever had, and won’t allow anybody, including Sophie’s own kids, to get near to her. With this newfound realization, Rebecca and Martin make their way back home to try and rescue their mother but once inside, the doors lock shut and the lights go out, one by one, leaving them scared and helpless as they try to save Sophie and get her, and themselves, out of the house, before the last light dims.
Director David F. Sandberg made a short film in 2013 titled “Lights Out,” which was only three minutes long and utilized the same basic premise here; a woman home alone, getting ready to go to bed turns off the lights when she can see the dark silhouette of a woman standing at the end of the hall. She turns the lights back on and she is gone but when she then turns them off again, she’s back. It is one of the simplest ideas imaginable but with the help of horror maestro James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Insidious”), its execution of a spectral figure appearing and disappearing in between lights on and lights off, is genuinely scary and hair-raising. Teresa Palmer keeps the entire movie grounded in reality with a steadfast and sincere performance, considering, at times, that she is surrounded by ludicrous and preposterous scenarios that are only believable because of her.
The film is only 81 minutes long but in today’s market of bloated and inflated epics, it makes for a nice change. The story begins, it moves along swiftly, and then it ends. Mr. Sandberg also has the boldness to end the movie with no indication of a sequel; no last-minute figure appearing in the window, no slow tracking shot up to the grave where a hand shoots out of the ground, the good guys live and the story ends. Mr. Sandberg is directing the sequel to the 2014 horror flick “Annabelle,” itself a spinoff from “The Conjuring,” and if “Lights Out” is anything to go by, I eagerly await 2017.
In theaters Friday, July 22nd
