Empire of Light

Directed by Sam Mendes, Empire of Light follows a lonely cinema manager (Olivia Colman’s Hilary Small) as she befriends a new employee (Micheal Ward’s Stephen) and slowly-but-surely begins to come out of her shell. Mendes, armed with his own screenplay, delivers an often excessively hit-and-miss drama that does, in the final analysis, fare best in its low-key opening stretch, as the picture, at the outset, comes off as an appealing (and appropriately subdued) character study set against the backdrop of a small-town movie theater in the 1980s – with the promising, engaging atmosphere heightened and perpetuated by Colman’s sympathetic and entirely convincing turn as the melancholy protagonist. It’s clear, then, that Empire of Light‘s momentum and effectiveness takes a palpable hit as it progresses into an admittedly unpredictable yet decidedly underwhelming midsection, as Mendes offers up a pair of hit-and-miss subplots that contribute heavily to the increasingly uneven vibe and eventually diminish the impact of certain key sequences within the film’s second half – with the watchable feel, then, stemming mostly from Roger Deakins’ striking visuals and the almost inherently compelling landscape in which the story transpires. The end result is a decent (if unspectacular) effort from a filmmaker whose output has become more and more erratic as of late, with the movie’s refreshingly earnest and down-to-earth bent, ultimately, compensating for its periodic bumps and lulls.

*** out of ****