Lights Out

Based on a legitimately creepy 2013 short film, Lights Out follows Teresa Palmer’s Rebecca as she must put aside her differences with her mom (Maria Bello’s Sophie) to save her little brother (Gabriel Bateman’s Martin) from a demonic menace. Director David F. Sandberg, making his feature-length debut here, does an excellent job of immediately capturing the viewer’s interest, as Lights Out kicks off with a pre-title sequence that’s as creepy and engrossing as the aforementioned short. It’s fairly disappointing to note, then, that the movie segues into a slow-moving and progressively uneventful thriller, with Eric Heisserer’s screenplay detailing the central character’s less-than-engrossing exploits and her efforts at both keeping her brother safe and figuring out just what the pursuing demon wants. The script’s emphasis on the latter is especially tedious, to be sure, as great swaths of the midsection are devoted to Rebecca’s Ring-like investigation into the demon’s tragic past – with the growing explanation for what happened to him/her/it draining the proceedings of tension on an increasingly regular basis (ie the monster essentially stops being frightening once the viewer is asked to sympathize with it). It doesn’t help, either, that Sandberg dials down the violence to an almost absurd degree, with the movie’s far-from-captivating atmosphere exacerbated by a low body count and proliferation of somewhat ineffective jump scares. And although the picture does liven up a little in its comparatively energetic third act, Lights Out ultimately can’t quite justify its full-length running time and is, for the most part, unable to live up to the high bar set by its preceding short (and its own opening stretch, certainly).

** out of ****