The story is overwrought, the characters limp, and the performances disaffected. It’s a far cry from the freaky grace of his short.īut that’s not the only problem. Watching Lights Out is like standing next to an idiot with an air horn, never quite knowing when it’s about to blow in your ear. Jump scares are all Sandberg seems to have in his bag of tricks, and each is clunkily executed and met with an agonizing, ear-piercing shriek. Wan’s a fine filmmaker in his own right, but the agonizing, dunderheaded approach to jump scares he demonstrated in the Insidious series seems to have infected his protege. Sandberg’s original short is essentially two done right: slow build, repetition, the suffusion of dread within supposed comfort, and finally, along with a gentle strike of sound, the terrifying reveal. By stretching it out, building a mythology, and putting laughably bad dialogue in people’s mouths, Sandberg hasn’t just stripped his movie of scares, he’s hobbled his own skills as a filmmaker. Nobody liked the “Lights Out” short because of the characters or the monster or the “story” they liked it because it got under their skin. It’s wonderful that The Conjuring director James Wan recognized Sandberg’s talent, and even more so that virality gave this young filmmaker an opportunity to make a big-budget studio film, but some stories benefit from brevity. (Ranking: Every Horror Movie Sequel From Worst to Best) As such, Rebecca and Martin must band together with Rebecca’s dopey boyfriend, Bret ( Alexander DiPersia, looking fresh off a tour with Daughtry), to both overcome Diana and bring Sophie back from the brink of mental collapse. And since she wants Sophie all to herself that means killing off the others. But Diana, it turns out, is much more than a vision rather, she’s a spectral monster that thrives in darkness and is harmed by light both natural and superficial. It still concerns this creature of the darkness, but centers the story around twentysomething Rebecca ( Teresa Palmer) and pre-teen Martin ( Gabriel Bateman), a pair of siblings whose disturbed mother, Sophie ( Maria Bello), is beset by visions of someone named Diana. Unfortunately, Lights Out, Sandberg’s feature-length adaptation of the short, is neither of those things. A brief respite, then he does it again, eventually giving us an even freakier final image. Lights on, lights off, lights on and off again, until a glimpse at the shadow’s true form couples with a slight squeal of strings to make us shriek. When she turns the light on, however, it disappears. In it, actress Lotta Losten plays a woman who sees a human-shaped entity in the darkness of her apartment. Sandberg made “Lights Out”, a three-minute master class in how to execute an effective jump scare.
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