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Lights Out

Released for home viewing just in time for Halloween, Lights Out plays on a primal fear of the dark, specifically disputing the grown-up wisdom that says there’s nothing lurking in the darkness that isn’t there in the light.

Martin (Gabriel Bateman) would beg to differ. After the brutal death of his father, Martin is alarmed to find his mom Sophie (Maria Bello) huddled in darkness, in conversation with an unseen “friend” named Diana. Martin fears the worst, as mom has endured periods of mental illness before.

But when he sees the figure of Diana (played by dancer-stuntwoman Alicia Vela-Bailey) lurking in the dark, he is scared sleepless. That brings him into the custody of his older half-sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), a woman whose own haunted past with Sophie has left her with commitment issues with her boyfriend, Bret (Alexander DiPersia).

Rebecca intervenes, assuming Martin is simply feeling the effects of their mother’s crippling neuroses, until she links Martin’s story with her own girlhood encounter with Diana. Her investigation leads into some dark corners of the family history, and an eventual showdown.

Based on his chilling horror short of the same title (do check it out on YouTube), this thriller by director David Sandberg is largely hinged on the short film’s simple but effective gimmick, in which a menacing backlit figure appears when lights are turned off. The hero is only safe from harm while occupying a lit space, and Sandberg and co-screenwriter Eric Heisserer contrive many ways to keep potential victims in the dark, including an ingenious early scene employing motion-activated lights.

Somehow not as scary as the short film, it nevertheless works modestly well to induce some gratifying chills. The central concept works well as a metaphor for the familial challenges of mental illness in much the same way as the 2014 Australian film The Babadook was a metaphor for crippling grief, but without that film’s more artistic aspirations.

Ultimately, Lights Out is mainly interested in freaking you out. The film’s child actor is a tad overwrought in his performance, but Palmer and Bello are sufficiently engaged that they keep you on edge. ★★★

 

Nerve

This young-adult thriller is likewise seasonally appropriate, not because it’s scary, but because it features lots of young people doing dumb, dangerous things. (In that, it may be more geared to Hell Night than Halloween.)

It’s something of a relief for Hunger Games/Divergent/Maze Runner-saturated moviegoers that this adaptation of a young-adult novel does not have a Chosen One out to fight for liberty in a future dystopia. In fact, it pertinently touches a contemporary nerve with a story of an online video game that places its obsessive players in mortal danger. Nerve is kind of like Pokemon Go, only instead of scouring the landscape looking for invisible monsters, players are invited to ride motorcycles at high speeds blindfolded, hang off construction cranes, or run out in public wearing only underwear… or no underwear, in one case.

Looking for monsters? In this game, they’re the one watching the gameplay and dreaming up ever more dangerous tasks.

Chronically timid high school student Venus (Emma Roberts) can only bear awestruck witness to the ramifications of the game when her best friend Sydney (Emily Meade) wins money taking the dare to do her cheerleading duties without panties. Venus is already putting college on hold at the behest of her needy mother (Juliette Lewis) and is stung when Sydney calls her out on her fearful state of existence.

Seized by a moment of bad judgment, Venus signs onto Nerve as a player and finds herself in a diner, challenged to kiss a stranger for five seconds. That stranger turns out to be a leading Nerve player named Ian (Dave Franco). The audience for the game decide the two have chemistry and contrive to pair them up for bigger and hairier challenges.

The film’s co-directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Catfish, Paranormal Activity 3), are also in the contrivance business when it comes to lending a sense of found-footage immediacy to the scripted drama. The movie does indeed have a jittery, camera-phone untidiness to its cinematography and its editing is, well, less haphazard than it looks.

But that effort at aesthetic spontaneity largely goes to waste as the film veers deeper into high-tech conspiracy territory, with Venus and Ian playing the photogenic heroes against the progressively evil “watchers” intent on placing these characters in a corner from which only one can escape.

It might have been downright stressful if we bought into the premise and believed in the characters. As it is, there is only one thing to say to the presumption we should care: Some nerve. ★★ out of five

 

Captain Fantastic

In this drama, the counterculture is alive and well, as embodied by Ben (Viggo Mortensen), a father who has taken himself off the grid to raise and educate his six children in the pristine wilds of the Pacific Northwest.

It had been a duty he shared with his wife. But when she dies unexpectedly (not in the manner you might think), Ben piles his kids in a school bus to travel from the rugged family paradise to the manicured golf courses of New Mexico. It’s all to honour his Buddhist wife’s wish to be cremated. This brings Ben in direct conflict with his father-in-law Jack (Frank Langella), a well-heeled and ruthless retiree who holds Ben responsible for his only child’s demise.

When Ben interrupts his wife’s funeral, the stage is set for a showdown. But the family unit is not as tight as Ben believes. One problem: Ben’s eldest son, Bodevan (George MacKay), is starting to feel the socially constrictive confines of being raised away from people his own age, especially after an embarrassing stab at romance in a trailer park. Another problem: Ben’s angry middle son, Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton), is feeling even more rebellious, blaming his father for his mother’s untimely death.

Writer-director Matt Ross studiously avoids framing the conflict with a hippies-versus-straights dynamic we might have expected of a studio film. The very first scene of the film, a deer-hunting scene, is pretty much the antithesis of an entry into a feel-good family comedy. If it’s a bit grim, it establishes an unconventional tough-mindedness when it comes to its portrayal of this family, complete with expletive-laden dialogue and a certain criminal cunning. (If a traffic cop gets on your bus, it’s better to present as home-schooled Christians than home-schooled hippies.)

The film also offers an often startling argument against the status quo, especially when it comes to childrearing. Ben and family have a stopover at the house of his sister-in-law (Kathryn Hahn), where his intellectually vigorous kids offer a stunning contrast to their cousins, who are video-game-addicted sluggards.

It’s kind of surprising the film’s finale is such a cop-out, a buy-in to the notion home-schooled kids are socially compromised. But at its best, it’s a film that shares attributes with its troubled hero: it’s smart, challenging and unconventionally handsome. ★★★1/2

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing