In short: All Light Will End (2018)

Warning: spoilers, but that’s for your own good!

Writer Savannah (Ashley Pereira), fresh off her first, bestselling novel, decides to return to her former home for her brother’s graduation. There’s more baggage to that return than typical. Her mother committed suicide by hanging in the house she’s now returning to (and in fact, her estranged father and local sheriff doesn’t live there anymore), and she has terrible nightmares about her childhood. Well, I say nightmares, but actually, Savannah suffers from various vaguely defined psychological problems, among them the tendency to have a rather difficult time making out the difference between dreams and reality. At least she’s not going alone, for her boyfriend, her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend are coming with. That, however, might not be as great as it sounds once things become a bit violent around the place.

While this is going on, the film regularly cuts to Savannah’s father and his two bumbling deputies who find various body parts around town while acting close to Wes Craven Keystone Kops.

At first, Chris Blake’s All Light Will End looks like a slickly filmed, straightforward little horror movie that’ll soon enough get around to drag out the old “the creature from the protagonist’s nightmare is real!” card. However, the film’s a bit more ambitious, for it turns out this is supposed to be an example of the twisty psychological thriller. Unfortunately, it’s a rather bad example, and once it finds its supposed stride as a thriller, the initially competent if not terribly exciting film turns to be way out of its league.

For a film that spends a – too long – scene at a therapy session and supposedly wants to base what’s happening on consciously induced psychological damage, the film seems to have little idea about actual human psychology (and in fact, some viewers might find its treatment of mental illness rather offensive), or how to plot this sort of thing without resorting to cheap gimmicks like that pretty pointless nonsense it does with the story’s timeline, wasting too many scenes on preparing an uninteresting twist. Time and place isn’t the film’s strong suit in any way, because for most of its plot to work (as far as it does work), it needs to be terribly vague about lots of things, mostly concerning time and space.


And look, I get how filmmakers may approach this sort of story thinking more about what would be cool to do on screen rather than what is plausible, but when you go that road, you really need to drag your audience over the wall of ridiculous nonsense you’ve built up with the power of sheer visual style and force. Alas, while the film is certainly slick to look at, it is no giallo or Brian De Palma flick, and never manages to convince the viewer (nor the actors, going by their vague and unconvincing efforts) of anything happening on screen.