Lights Out review: Painfully over-stretched horror is downright laughable

Nonetheless, Lights Out is successful enough in what must have been its main goal, namely giving audiences the creeps.

Dir: David F Sandberg, 81 mins, starring: Teresa Palmer, Maria Bello, Billy Burke, Alicia Vela-Bailey, Emily Alyn Lind, Gabriel Bateman

In terms of plotting and characterisation, Lights Out is inept and often downright laughable, but you need a different set of criteria for assessing horror movies. In its own deeply contrived way, the film is just as frightening as you want it to be.

Director David F Sandberg is shameless (but effective) in the way he recycles hackneyed old devices to scare us out of our seats – shrieking music on the soundtrack, jarring cuts, ghoulish reflections in the mirror, words scratched on floorboards, tailors’ dummies and a harpy-like, long-taloned creature who only becomes visible when the lights are out.

This leads to ghoulishly comic strobe-like scenes in which she appears and then vanishes as her victims play with light switches, torches or, in the film’s most absurd moment, car keys.

Maria Bello plays Sophie, a traumatised, highly strung middle-aged mum whose first husband left her in mysterious circumstances. Long ago, as a child, Sophie was briefly an inmate in an asylum where she was befriended by the psychopathic Diana, who had bad skin and was super-sensitive to light. Now, it seems, Diana (or her spirit) has come back to haunt her and to keep at bay anyone who tries to come between her and Sophie.

Her greatest wrath is reserved for Sophie’s immediate family – her grown-up daughter Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) from her first marriage and her young son Martin (Gabriel Bateman).

There are moments throughout when you’re scratching your head, thinking this just doesn’t make any sense at all. If Diana is a projection of Sophie’s own dark neuroses, how come she is seemingly able to travel around town at will, even as Sophie stays cooped up at home?

What gives the ability to turn out all those lights and snuff out those candles? The screenplay relies very heavily on coincidence and the film seems painfully over-stretched, even with a running time of barely 80 minutes.

Nonetheless, Lights Out is successful enough in what must have been its main goal – namely, giving audiences the creeps.