Teresa Palmer’s Horror Debut Has One Trick and Uses It Well

David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out runs 81 minutes. The premise is a single rule — the woman in the dark cannot reach you when the lights are on — and that rule is the entire engine of the film. What the movie does with it, and how long it can hold you, is the whole question.

Trailer, via Warner Bros..

A Silhouette in the Textile Factory

The film opens at closing hours in a textile factory. Esther, played by Lotta Losten, says goodbye to her boss Paul, played by Billy Burke. On her way out she sees a silhouette of a woman with claw-like hands. The figure vanishes when the lights come on and returns when they go off. Paul meets the same woman. He locks himself in an office and is killed when the lights go out.

That cold open is the movie in miniature, and it is the best sequence Sandberg directs. No backstory, no explaining, just a woman, a hallway, and a switch. The tagline — “You were right to be afraid of the dark” — is doing honest work here. The feature is based on Sandberg’s own 2013 short film, and the opening keeps the short’s economy.

Martin, Sophie, and the Woman Called Diana

Some time later, Paul’s son Martin, played by Gabriel Bateman, sees his mother Sophie, played by Maria Bello, talking to something in the dark. Sophie comforts him. As Martin goes back to bed he sees a figure in the shadow behind her and locks himself in his room.

Martin starts having trouble staying awake at school. The nurse cannot reach Sophie, so Paul’s stepdaughter Rebecca, played by Teresa Palmer, is called in. A Child Protective Services agent questions Rebecca about Martin’s living conditions. Rebecca says Sophie is taking antidepressants.

Martin tells Rebecca their mother has been talking to a woman named Diana. Rebecca tells him Diana is not real. She heard their mother talk to the imaginary girl when she was a child too. At Martin’s house, Rebecca argues with Sophie when she realizes her mother is not taking her medication. Sophie accuses Rebecca of abandoning her the way Rebecca’s father did. Rebecca takes Martin to her apartment. That night the same shadowed woman who killed Paul comes for Rebecca. She escapes by turning on the lights.

The cast fills the roles the screenplay needs:

• Teresa Palmer as Rebecca, the half-sister who left and comes back
• Maria Bello as Sophie, the mother who stopped taking her medication
• Gabriel Bateman as Martin, the boy who sees what adults will not
• Alexander DiPersia as Bret, Rebecca’s boyfriend
• Alicia Vela-Bailey as Diana, the antagonist
• Billy Burke as Paul, Martin’s father, killed in the opening

What the Runtime Buys

The runtime is not a flaw by itself. Lights Out has no fat on it. The film has one idea and no second act. Diana is a creature of pure mechanism. She comes in the dark. She stops at light. She is attached to Sophie, and the film treats that attachment as an explanation when it is only a premise.

Eric Heisserer wrote the screenplay, and the producers are Heisserer, Lawrence Grey and James Wan. Wan’s name is the tell. This is a film built by people who know how to sell a monster and a rule. What they have not built is a reason to care about the people the monster is chasing. Sophie’s refusal to take her medication is the film’s one attempt at human damage, and Bello plays it with real weight. The script does not give her enough room.

The mechanics are clean. Lights on, she is gone. Lights off, she is there. Sandberg shoots it well, and the film was shot in Los Angeles from June to August 2015. It grossed $148 million against a budget of $4.9 million. A sequel is in development. The gross is the number the industry will read, and it is the number that matters most to whatever comes next.

Where the Rule Breaks

Here is what matters. The published critical score is 5.8 out of 10 — Metacritic 58 out of 100 — and that is the right number, because Lights Out is a good short film stretched into a feature that never earns its extra time.

The ranking of what works is not close:

1. The opening factory sequence, which is genuinely frightening
2. Maria Bello’s performance as Sophie, the only character with an interior
3. The light-switch mechanic itself, which is simple and clean
4. Everything the film does to explain Diana, which is nothing

The film had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 8, 2016, and Warner Bros. Pictures released it in the United States and Canada on July 22, 2016. It arrived as a summer horror release with a hook you could put on a poster, and it delivered exactly that much.

The verdict is that Lights Out is a demonstration, not a story. Sandberg proves he can build tension out of a hallway and a light switch. The film keeps trying to find a reason for Diana to exist and never finds one. The horror is real. The movie around it is thin.

David F. Sandberg · horror movies · James Wan · Lights Out · movie review · Teresa Palmer