Lights Out: Film Review

When I walked in to the theater to view the recently released horror movie Lights Out, I certainly was not expecting much. Sure I expected a few cheap thrills here and there, but from the looks of the trailers, the movie didn’t seem to have much of a plot other than “a monster attacks whenever the lights go out.” Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised and proven wrong, very quickly I might add.

While I’ll try to avoid spoiling anything, I do want to say that the films first scene gives a proper scare right off the bat, especially for a PG-13 horror film. The film really explored the instinctual fear that many of us have towards darkness, all while keeping a pretty sound plot. I was also impressed with the characters within the film. Most of them strayed from typical horror films stereotypes; the boyfriend actually wasn’t a scumbag, the Child Services worker didn’t become a secondary antagonist throughout the whole film, and even the psychotic mother had moments where you felt a lot of empathy for her, which brings me to the next thing I wanted to mention about the film…

While the movie is a horror movie at its heart, it also provided a bit of social commentary on mental illness and its effects on family. In particular, it showed how a parent’s mental illness can really take a toll on the children, while also showing that the parent still cares deeply about the children, their actions simply being out of their control. Rarely are we able to see this in a horror film that’s comes in at barely an hour and twenty minutes, and it was a necessary component to making this one stand out amongst other horror pictures.

I also feel that the director (David Sandberg) did an impressive job of adapting his original short film (one that was only about 3 minutes long) into a feature length film with such a coherent story. Props should also be given to him for essentially recreating a segment of the original short with the same actress in the opening scene of Lights Out.

Of course, the movie was not without its faults. While Maria Bello did a relatively good job in her performance, I personally felt that at times her impressions of a psychotic mother were not necessarily believable, though by the end of the film I forgive her for her stumbles. I also felt that a few clichés still managed to make their way into Lights Out. More than a few occasions I felt that a character was simply going towards a dark room just so we could have something jump out at us, with little to no other reason other than that.

Overall, however, Lights Out was a well suited summer horror movie, that certainly surpassed my expectations. It had a very strong, and in my opinion unexpected, ending that I applaud the director for having the courage to do, as well as plenty of scares to give you enough bang for your buck. One last word of advice for parents though: just because it is PG-13, I wouldn’t necessarily be bringing any younger children to see it anytime soon, otherwise your electric bill might be going up considering they’ll probably want to be sleeping with their lights ON….

Jesse Hernandez

I am currently one of four leaders of a publication at UMass (The Tab UMass) and have an extreme passion for anything and everything having to do with film and, often times, TV