His grade-school-age son Martin (Gabriel Bateman) is falling asleep at school because at night he’s kept awake by the mysterious shadows that lurk in their big, old, dark Tudor Craftsman house, not to mention the fact that his disturbed mother Sophie ( Maria Bello) surreptitiously talks to someone named Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey).Īlso Read: 'The Conjuring 2' Poised to Possess Weekend Box OfficeĪ concerned counselor at Martin’s school calls Martin’s older stepsister Rebecca ( Teresa Palmer), who moved out after her own father left the family years ago, and who believes her mother is too unstable to look after Martin. Paul’s home life, we learn as Eric Heisserer‘s screenplay unfolds, hasn’t been so rosy, either.
Needless to say, closing time doesn’t end well. Sandberg’s handling of this nifty far-then-close effect, which caught the eye of producers Wan and Lawrence Grey, is now the opening of the expanded movie, set in a textile factory at night, with Losten as an employee shutting things down for her boss Paul (Billy Burke), and encountering the gnarled, spindly-fingered figure when turning out a workroom light. Curious, she keeps toggling, until one flick too many results in the figure instantly materializing right next to her. The Internet short, starring Sandberg’s wife Lotta Losten, is a three-minute exercise in claustrophobic fright: a lone woman (Losten) in her apartment realizes that when she flicks off the hallway lightswitch, she sees the outline of a figure at the other end. That the film occasionally succumbs to certain rudimentary hallmarks of industrial studio horror is regrettable, but for the most part it’s agreeably suspenseful, date-night arm-squeezing genre fare.Īlso Read: 'Insidious: Chapter 4' Lands Director, 2017 Release Date That really means cagey indirect light, the kind that’s turned heaps of clothes into imagined monsters since kids were first tucked into beds. Sandberg, building on his popular viral short, and fright impresario James Wan (“The Conjuring 2”) - works a clever gimmick that seems tailor-made for the visual particulars of movies: a terrorizing figure one can only detect when there’s no illumination. The plucky and well-acted, if not always shiver-inducing, “Lights Out” - from first-time feature director David F. Horror films, by necessity, live in a world where what’s unseen is often scarier than what’s visible.
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