I have the same overarching philosophy about horror films that I do about comedies: If it makes me scream (or laugh), that’s more than half the battle to getting me to like it. Using a fairly straightforward gimmick that doesn’t vary much from scene to scene, LIGHTS OUT certainly does deliver the scares as a fractured family deals with a ghost who seems to hide in the shadows. When there’s light, she is invisible and can’t hurt you; when the lights go out, she becomes quite tangible and visible and will likely murder you. The film happens to come courtesy of producer James Wan, whose recent THE CONJURING 2 was so damn scary that his name on any other movie is going to count for something for many audiences.
From first-time feature director David F. Sandberg (the film is based on his short, which has been adapted by Eric Heisserer), LIGHTS OUT tells the story of two children—the grownup Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) and her still young brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman)—whose mother, Sophie (Maria Bello), is slowly losing her mind and willingness to protect her children from a terrible presence in their home— a creature known as Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey), whom Sophie believes is her friend but in truth is destroying everything close to Sophie, including her late husband (Billy Burke), who is attacked in a flashback that serves as the film’s opening.
Sophie’s long belief that Diana was her friend led to Rebecca leaving the house to begin with, and now she lives alone and has a boyfriend named Bret (Alexander DiPersia) who is helping her overcome her frustration with her mother while attempting to protect her brother from potential harm. During the course of the very short film, the mystery of Diana is revealed (it’s not all that shocking or interesting), relationships are torn apart and put back together, and an admittedly creepy-looking ghost gets to rip some shit up (as much shit as a PG-13 rating will allow, at least).
As an exercise in pacing and scary atmosphere and smash cuts with loud music cues that make audiences jump, LIGHTS OUT is a fully functional scare movie. But I could not have given any number of craps about these characters or this extremely self-made mess they find themselves in. Each one of them makes one bad decision after another that puts them in deeper danger, and it took me all of about 10 minutes to stop caring about their collective fates. Yes, I realize that without dumb decisions, 90 percent of horror movies wouldn’t exist, but I couldn’t get past it here, primarily because Bello is such a gifted actor that I found it hard to believe she could be so easily fooled by a creepy ghost.
I’m not saying I didn’t jump out of my seat more than a few times, and none of the performances are inherently bad, but the material is just plain weak and horribly uninspired. I appreciated the dynamic of the family as the compassionate framework for this story, but each character is so underwritten that my heart just wasn’t in this one. All of that being said, LIGHTS OUT has enough going for it that I’m genuinely looking forward to whatever director Sandberg has next (after ANNABELLE 2; that I'm not so sure I'm curious about). If he follows the lead of his producer, he’ll flesh out the characters on his next a bit more and hopefully he’ll have something truly inspired.
