This is one of the most well made movies with one of the worst written scripts I’ve seen. If you can overlook some bad writing you’ll have a fun time with this spooky little movie.

The movie is based on a viral short film that involves a woman turning off the light in a room only to see the faint outline of a person in the dark staring at them. When the light gets turned back on the figure disappears. Off and on, off and on, until the figure appears too close for comfort. it’s a great little film. Definitely check it out.

But you can see from that description how small and isolated the short is. The filmmakers faced a massive challenge taking that tiny premise and expanding it to feature length. The director was David F Sandberg who made the short film. He brings the same craft and vision to the feature that he brought to the short. The screenwriter was Eric Heisserer who was not up to the task.

Let’s start with the good. When Sandberg gets to direct the film soars. His handle on visual storytelling is masterful. He crafts suspenseful scenes without dialogue, but ratchets up the tension with camera movement, lighting, and sound design.

He recreates his short film early in the movie to great effect. When he chooses to cut and how long he holds shots is impeccable. He crafts a great scene where a red neon sign flickering outside a window means the ghost appears and disappears sporadically. It’s great. Later on when someone tries to shoot the ghost the flash of light from the gun barrel causes the ghost to disappear briefly and reappear as it stalks toward the shooter. Brilliant stuff.

The atmosphere he creates is wonderful. The use of light and shadow is excellent. The sound design in the creaking and cracking fingers of the ghost are wonderful. He uses jump scares but he uses them really well. They are effective and tension building rather than suspense diminishing.

The problem with the film is the script. Heisserer is a good writer. He wrote the excellent alien visitors story Arrival. I think he was given an impossible task and couldn’t pull it off.

We’re dipping into spoiler territory so skip the next two paragraphs if you want to check it out.

Okay, so Heisserer had to take a short film that lasted a few couple minutes maximum. It had no dialogue and no characters. He had to flesh it out to an hour and a half runtime. So he went with a woman estranged from her family who is visited by her terrified young brother because he had seen their mother talking to someone in the shadows. The woman relives her own past trauma and reconnects with her family through overcoming a supernatural entity. It’s a pretty classic horror narrative, but the problems lie in the specifics.

The mother (played by Maria Bello) was hospitalized as a child and met another girl with an allergic reaction to sunlight and violent tendencies and maybe psychic powers. The scientists tried to cure her with an intense light treatment that accidentally incinerated her. She returned years later as maybe a ghost, maybe a psychic manifestation of the mothers mental state, maybe a demon, and at one point she might have been a real woman living in the basement. What powers does she have? She can appear in any shadow even under the bed in a brightly lit room, but flashlights will keep her at bay, and candles. She can turn off electric lights, and mess with electricity, but she can’t blow out a candle. She can pull a grown man off his feet into the shadows but won’t if that man needs to live.

Spoilers over

The waters get real muddy real fast in the script. The more it explains, the less it works. Mostly because the explanations are kind of dumb. I can see what they were going for but it’s not great. The contradictions and outright silliness of the script hinder the movie greatly from a story perspective. That said when the director is making magic it’s really magic.

It’s a mixed bag. Half a cup of tea for me.

Full disclosure this is the second time I’ve seen this movie. It didn’t leave a big impact the first time, but I enjoyed it more this time. I had fun. I jumped in my chair. isn’t that all we’re really looking for in a movie?