Caffeinated Clint
“Half Light” presses all the buttons a skin-creeper should (Moore and Matheson ensure it has some charm in the duller scenes as well) but judged overall it is too derivative and too similar to movies that are vastly superior to it.
Demi Moore, Hans Matheson, Henry Ian Cusick, Beans Balawi
Rachel Carlson (Moore) is a best-selling thriller writer who lives with her husband Brian (Cusick) and son Thomas (Balawi) in a London cottage situated on a beautiful stream. An accomplished editor, Brian wants to be an author as well, but publishers continually reject his work – a symptom, Brian says, of the ‘King syndrome’ (referring to Tabitha King’s inability to have anything published because she is the husband of famous horror writer Stephen). But otherwise they lead a charmed life.
That is until Rachel leaves a gate open and Thomas falls into the stream and drowns (a woeful deus ex machina, especially since there is a low-bowed boat right next to him, but we’ll save criticisms for later). Grief tears their marriage apart and Rachel heads off to a remote house in Scotland to try and overcome a severe case of writer’s block. It’s there she meets a handsome lighthouse keeper, Angus McCulloch, who helps her to feel again and fill those blank pages with words. But just as she thinks she has found something approaching happiness, the locals have a disturbing thing to tell her about Angus. And then there are the spooky little signs that her dead son might be floating around the place too…
With its suspenseful moments thanks largely to superb cinematography and eerie locations, “Half Light” is a spine-tingler in the same vein as “The Sixth Sense” or “Stir of Echoes”. However, Aussie writer/director Craig Rosenberg (who wrote the screenplay to the underrated “After The Sunset”), seems to struggle with his convoluted subject matter. The major twist, when it comes, is unexpected – but only because it’s so implausible as to be absurd and therefore impossible to predict. The finale, too, while tying things up neatly, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and seems divorced from the movie’s themes up to that point.
Further, any fan of Stephen King will note “Half Light”’s many similarities to the book “Bag of Bones” – and Rosenberg’s influences are further exposed when he drops in little SK references, such as the title of Rachel’s first book, ‘Dreamers Awake’. King has frequently referred to life’s more incredible events as “dreaming awake”.
“Half Light” presses all the buttons a skin-creeper should (Moore and Matheson ensure it has some charm in the duller scenes as well) but judged overall it is too derivative and too similar to movies that are vastly superior to it.
No Extras.
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Reviewer : Mark Bennett
