Lights Out (2016) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Thriller

Tagline: You were right to be afraid of the dark.

When Rebecca left home, she thought she left her childhood fears behind. Growing up, she was never really sure of what was and wasnt real when the lights went out and now her little brother, Martin, is experiencing the same unexplained and terrifying events that had once tested her sanity and threatened her safety. A frightening entity with a mysterious attachment to their mother, Sophie, has reemerged.

But this time, as Rebecca gets closer to unlocking the truth, there is no denying that all their lives are in danger once the lights go out.

Storyline: A man called Paul is working after hours and is murdered by a supernatural entity in the shadow. When his son, the boy Martin, is frightened by the same creature, he sees his mother Sophie talking to an imaginary friend called Diana in the shadow of her room. Martin does not sleep anymore during the night. His older step sister Rebecca who lives alone is summoned by the social assistant. She brings Martin home and recalls her own experience with Diana years ago when she was young. Sophie and her boyfriend Bret investigate the connection of Sophie with Diana and come up to a scary revelation about their past. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, October 23, 2016 Lights Out began as a short film less than three minutes long, in which Swedish writer/director David F. Sandberg offered a clever variation on the familiar sensation of being afraid of the dark. Released in December 2013 on Vimeo and YouTube, the short went viral, attracting the attention of major industry players and prompting Sandberg to relocate to L.A. with his wife (and the short's star), where horror meister James Wan ( The Conjuring) produced Sandberg's feature-length expansion of Lights Out for Warner Brothers' New Line Cinema division. The film debuted to critical and popular acclaim in July 2016, grossing $148 million worldwide. That may not sound like much in this blockbuster era, but it's a profitable haul for a film with a production budget under $5 million.

Sandberg's original short established Lights Out's central device of a supernatural presence that vanishes in the light, only to reappear in the dark an instant later, often moving closer to its victim with each flick of the switch. The feature film's script by Eric Heisserer (The Thing prequel and the forthcoming Arrival) expands this notion into the realm of family conflict, which is classical territory for the horror genre. In the film's prologue, a spectral invader appears in the shadowy halls of a clothing manufacturing plant, menacing an employee who has remained after hours. (The employee is played by Sandberg's wife, Lotta Losten, reprising a variation of her role from the original short.) Soon, however, the ghost is revealed to be haunting the family of Sophie (Maria Bello), a troubled mother with a history of bipolar disorder. The ghost also visits Sophie's estranged daughter, Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), who has left home and shut down emotionally from the trauma of being abandoned by her father (among other things), to the frustration of her part-time boyfriend, Bret (Alexander DiPersia). Rebecca's half-brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), lives with their mother, where he is terrified by the apparition's repeated and sometimes violent incursions.

Sandberg unpacks this tortured family history gradually over Lights Out's taut 81-minute running time. (The film was originally nine minutes longer, before a major sequence was dropped during previews; see the "Supplements" discussion.) But he does so while providing the family and the audience with ever more unsettling demonstrations of the ghost's malevolent intentions. The specter, who is recognizably female, identifies itself as "Diana" (she is played by former stunt double Alicia Vela-Bailey), and Heisserer's script provides her with a back story that is probably more elaborate than it needs to be. Sandberg wisely concentrates on engineering a series of scares, cleverly working multiple variations on his initial concept of Diana's threatening outline appearing in the dark, then suddenly vanishing when she's hit with light, only to reappear in darkness moments later. By the end of the film, it's clear that this particular ghost has become an expert at engineering the environment to suit its particular needs, even going so far as to attack the city's electrical grid.

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to grasp why troubled family relations are a recurring element in horror films or why our deepest and most irrational fears so often attach to those closest to us. Sandberg and Heisserer tread well-worn territory in Lights Out, but they do so skillfully, leading to a shocker of a conclusion that neatly plays off the family theme.

James Wan has become a one-man horror studio in recent years, directing two Conjuring films and two chapters of the Insidious franchise, while also producing Annabelle, Demonic and now Lights Out. A sequel has already been greenlit to this latest addition to the Wan catalog, and one can only hope that Sandberg resists the pull toward bloat and excess that weighed down The Conjuring 2. As he has so ably demonstrated in Lights Out, horror films work best when they're lean and economical. Warner's presentation is excellent and highly recommended.

[CSW] -3.3- I really like having a new type of monster. Good monsters are very hard to create with only a handful have remained in the public conciseness long enough to become classic. I hope to see this one further developed because it seems to have real potential. With that said, I couldn't have said this any better than these two reviewers:
The film could have used a little more depth and background on Diana; however, overall I had a good time with this movie. It moves fairly quickly and has a great mix of scary, tender, and funny moments sometimes happening simultaneously. The climactic ending was not as strong as I would have liked and slightly disappointing, but definitely a nice horror flick that would warrant a spot in a scary movie marathon. --- The people who made this movie make it look very easy - but if making a good horror movie were really this easy, everyone would do it. Whereas, in fact, most of the people who try, fail. Lights Out is a blueprint for how to do it right: come up with an original idea, find the right writer and director, find the right actors. Sounds easy, but again, if it were...

[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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