Nerds That Geek Movie Review: ‘Lights’

Written by Scott Edwards

It is difficult to move on from any situation when you have a lack of closure. Not being able to air your feelings about it, or say goodbye, or flat out not know what happened has kept many of us awake at night. There are instances where people go missing and you can see it in their family’s eyes that they are dying to know what has happened to their loved one. Keeping faith that their loved ones are okay, even after years have passed, if there is nothing to point the other way, then in their minds their loved one is still out there, somewhere, waiting to be found.
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A year has passed since Lisa has last seen her boyfriend and baby’s father, Kurt, and she is still not willing to give up on him. But her life is slowly starting to fall apart as the state is trying to make sure that she is a fit parent to the child. Not wanting to give in to the requests being piled upon her, the social worker finds that Lisa is still following missing persons reports like they are going out of style and takes baby Kim away from Lisa. Upset, Lisa is forced to rely on her brother for support, since he is the only family she has left, that is until a rushed phone call inspires her to find something new.

A year into retirement, former sheriff Jim is still on the case. Taking case files about missing people from his adjoining town, Jim is trying to find the connection and one has come into his sight, the lack of radio and cell signals in the area where the folks have gone missing. Passing this information on to Lisa and Karl, Jim is shocked to hear that there was more information on the cases that he was never aware of. Finding a memory card from the adventure that Kurt and his friends took into the mountains, Jim has new locations to check out and is chomping at the bit to help Lisa find a little bit of closure over what happened.

With his theories not sitting well with Karl, Jim tries to make sure that being supportive of his sister is the only thing that matters, because if she does not get closure from somewhere, she may be driven to leave her daughter without any parents. Karl comes onboard for one day and the group heads up into the mountains to investigate a spot where Kurt’s group stopped, but things start to get interesting when they stop by a house where the group laid up and find that it is no longer in existence. Needing more information on what is happening to them, Jim returns home to see that it has been ransacked by someone looking for the information that he is hiding. But that only confirms that they are getting closer to the truth, the truth that nobody wants them to find.

Talk about a story that is really focusing on what the government does not want you to know, with conspiracy theories about why the missing people were never investigated, to an alien abduction where even the survivors have no chance of making it out alive, the story really sticks with you after you watch it, and while I really wanted to know what happened to get Lisa in trouble and need to have a social worker checking up on her, the overall movie did not suffer by not answering those questions. Wanting nothing more than to find out the truth of what happened to her boyfriend Kurt, Lisa finally gets to put what she knows from his found footage to work while she travels to the mountains to see things through her own eyes. With a friendly camping trip gone wrong, two obsessed people looking for the truth, a black car following them every step of the way, a cover-up of massive proportions and not knowing who you can trust, this is a fun movie that integrates found footage with a fresh story very cleanly. It does make you wonder what we are not being told when it comes to strange invaders and such, but you might want to ask yourself this first, do you really want to know the truth? Stay Scared.

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