Those familiar with the remarkable short film "Lights Out" in 2013 are aware of the premiere of the story. A shadowy figure with splintered hair and threatening long nails is approaching each time the lamp key clicks. Click. The figure disappears into the light. Click. The thrills touch us from an unexpectedly approaching anthropomorphic image. Click. There is no one. Click ... Similarly, the feature film is based on Erik Heisener's screenplay, but the unnamed woman in the two-minute film is replaced by a man who finishes his workday at a factory. The same mysterious form appears in the shadows, and after a short play we find the man's bloodstained, bloody body. "Lights Out," does not hurl and does not engage the viewer with irritating details in revealing its story - we quickly understand the mentally unstable mother whose younger son, Martin, suffers from the monstrous representation of the problems in her head. His older sister Rebecca, who has long lived with them. As a younger girl, she has also encountered the shadowy presence in question, but has dismissed it as a nightmare of her childhood, and when her brother shares hir similar experiences, Rebecca does not think of anything more appropriate than taking him to his room for a night. Only to find that presence is real and appears every time the light goes out and the emotional state of the mother is unstable.
"Lights Out" reminds of the magnificent "The Babadook" in its main motif - unresolved issues of the mother's past and how they affect her children. But the chilling psychological tension that has been in the "Babadook," is replaced by a very real, frightening female figure, whose metaphorical meaning is depression, which gradually and forcefully divides the family, punishing the lives of all involved. On the other hand, "Lights Out" is a film about the different projections of our fear of the dark, which in youths is expressed in a terrifying horror, and in the elderly it becomes an inseparable part of their own essence. But in whatever categories we look at the allusion to the shady presence, it undoubtedly achieves its most important goal - to scare and scare.
The real pleasure of "Lights Out" lies in the operator's work and the sound. Sandberg's sense of composing inconvenient shots, where our attention is constantly focused on the shadows, looking for and expecting something that may not appear, creates tension over the longer duration of the 81-minute film. And the sounds (and their lack), accompanying every appearance of the presence, help create a suffocating atmosphere. David Sandberg's excellent directing feature transforms the simple feature into a spectacular genre that over-exposes an irritating (and most often meaningless) cliché - the so-called jump scares. But it does it in a way that is definitely worth seeing on a big screen. Although "Lights Out" does not miss any problems, he is definitely among this year's hordes of hordes and sets his director in the spotlights for people whose future work we will be watching. And if you can not decide whether you are watching, drop your short film and try your nerves.
