Review: Light from Light Steps into the Beyond with Finely Detailed Naturalism

Only in focusing so thoroughly on the normal does Paul Harrill’s film stumble upon the paranormal.

Light from Light
Photo: Grasshopper Film

Often viewed as delusional, opportunistic, or simply weird, paranormal investigators have seldom been treated seriously in popular culture. (Look no further than Nathan for You’s “Ghost Realtor” episode to see the stereotype amplified.) By contrast, writer-director Paul Harrill’s refreshing starting point in Light from Light is the idea that a paranormal investigator is as valid and complex a human subject as any, and that, in fact, it’s perfectly natural that an otherwise ordinary, workaday mom might be versed in the craft.

As the film begins, Shelia (Marin Ireland) is fielding questions from a local radio host (Rhoda Griffis), explaining a pair of prophetic encounters in her past that stoked her curiosity in the paranormal. And when asked whether she’s a believer or a skeptic, she sluggishly replies, “I don’t know what I am,” a response that casts her immediately as less a visionary outcast than a humble searcher for whom the paranormal is no greater an enigma than, say, parenting.

Stuck in a dead-end job at her local airport as a car rental clerk, Shelia is a paradigm of working-class, middle-American motherhood. Grinded into dispassion by her monotonous livelihood, she’s channeled whatever zeal she has left toward her son, Owen (Josh Wiggins), an earnest, soft-spoken high school senior in a wishy-washy relationship with a study buddy, Lucy (Atheena Frizzell). Ghost-hunting projects don’t come regularly, nor do they need to, since Shelia admits that taking money for them “just makes things more complicated.” Motivated less by financial necessity than some nebulous altruism that she herself may not fully understand, Shelia agrees to take on a case in a nearby county regarding a widower, Richard (Jim Gaffigan), who’s been plagued by suspicions that his late wife, who died in a recent plane crash, is still sharing residency in his quiet farmhouse.

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As Harrill establishes a sense of domestic ennui within a fog-shrouded rural Tennessee, it’s reasonable to expect from the film’s early going that it might be readying for a dip in the pool of the popular “elevated horror” subgenre. But a pair of discreet, matter-of-fact scenes at Richard’s house allay this suspicion. In the first, Shelia is escorted by her client through the various rooms of his home, each of which Harrill lingers on for a pregnant beat before or after they’re entered, hinting at potential unseen forces. But days later, when Shelia returns to the home alone, flashlight in hand, for her first evening sweep, her calls into the emptiness go unanswered, and the backgrounds of Harrill’s shadowy frames remain undisturbed by any dark figures. If jump scares were to emerge anywhere, surely it would have been here, but Harrill’s ultimately interested in the internal rather than the external, and Shelia’s assignment sets her on a path of interpersonal—as opposed to otherworldly—discovery.

Just as Light from Light flirts with the conventions of the haunted-house movie only to then skirt them, Harrill also dances around the suburban-set yarn about people’s quests for self-discovery, a subgenre designed to deliver shopworn reassurances about the gratifications of middle age. That the film avoids these traps has partly to do with Ireland and Gaffigan’s performances—each intricately shaded and reactive—and partly to do with Harrill’s probing screenplay, which engineers buildups to emotional epiphanies without indulging in the expected payoffs. A long, stark heart-to-heart on Richard’s front porch—Dreyer-esque in its total lack of aesthetic adornment—finds Shelia coming as close as she’ll get to reckoning with her own disappointment in life, only to pull back and apologize for her perceived oversharing. Later, a climactic hike to the scene of Richard’s wife’s death sputters out not with tears, but with hushed resignation and then a deflating revelation inside Shelia’s car.

Harrill’s characters must eventually contend with their doubts and uncertainties directly and through the solidarity of others. The subplot of Owen and Lucy’s relationship, which is stalled by Owen’s concern about what he sees as its inevitable splintering due to the pair’s differing college plans, interweaves with Shelia’s arc as something of a barometer of her own relationship to the unknown and to the future. It’s only when she begins to notice the growing chemistry between Owen and Lucy that she’s able to confront certain failures of imagination in her own life—and, in turn, to prompt a similar psychic turn from Richard.

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This might sound hokey, and it occasionally is, but Harrill doesn’t underline his characters’ breakthroughs, either through music (the minimal electric guitar score by War on Drugs members Adam Granduciel and Jon Natchez is used more for interstitial texture than scene punctuation) or camera movements. Harrill’s direction is clean and economical—witness the way the camera watches in one static take as Shelia, Owen, and Lucy shuffle out of the house in balletic synchronicity—and his observation keen. There’s something intuitively relatable, for instance, about the understated scene in which Shelia texts her friend about investigation equipment while at her day job and then self-consciously answers “Hello?” when he immediately rings her back, as though not expecting a call. It’s because of this finely detailed naturalism that Harrill is able to pull off the spontaneous miracle that concludes the film—again, shades of Dreyer—without it coming across as hokum. Only in focusing so thoroughly on the normal does Light from Light stumble upon the paranormal.

Score: 
 Cast: Marin Ireland, Jim Gaffigan, Josh Wiggins, Atheena Frizzell, David Cale, Rhoda Griffis  Director: Paul Harrill  Screenwriter: Paul Harrill  Distributor: Grasshopper Film  Running Time: 82 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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