Neon Lights (2022) 

A tech industry leader invites his siblings to stay with him in his mansion where things go sideways quickly.  

From a story by Rouzbeh Heydary, written by Dana Abraham, with story editor Nikolas Benn, and directed by Rouzbeh Heydari, this film is, well, a mess. There is a ton in here with a lot of directions being taken at any random time. The script and how it’s brought to the screen are clearly meant to mess with the viewers’ minds, but it all doesn’t come together in enough of a cohesive manner to keep the attention and as a film that requires the viewers to pay 1000% attention lest they get lost, this is a massive issue. The film itself doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go, using some storytelling devices that just don’t fit or don’t work here along with more twists than an M. Night skit on Robot Chicken. The story here follows lead Clay Amani in what at first seems like multiple versions of reality. Then the viewer discovers what might really be going on. Maybe not. Maybe… Before the end of the film most will have checked out and not give a flying squirrel what is going on anymore. And that’s the main problem of this film.  

In terms of acting, the cast does decent, which leads to assuming they were explained better what is supposed to be going on or they were very willing to go along with whatever they were told to do. In either case, the cast does decent here. Lead Dana Abraham as Clay does possibly the best of the bunch, but as he also wrote the script, this does make sense. The presence of Kim Coates is a very welcome sight here as he’s always does great no matter the material and offers a performance for the viewer to cling to. Of course, his character is far from clear here and there are some issues with him, but none of these are in his performance. The rest of the case does well, some of them coming off as very grating people which makes sense in the end, but those performances make it a bit harder to stay the course with these characters. 

The cinematography here is one of the few worthwhile pieces of this work (along with a few of the performances), but it’s also quite uneven throughout the film. It’s as if it’s trying too many styles as it goes along with the film and its twists and turns. This work by Dmitry Lopatin is great in some spots and absolutely not good in others. This makes it hard to judge how much control the cinematographer had over the images shot and chosen in the final edit. The good stuff here is great, the bad stuff on the other hand ends up looking amateurish.  

Neon Lights is a film that had potential on many levels and just blew it. The story is too all over the place to be followed properly. While it may be doing so with the purpose of being a bit of a mind-bend film, it doesn’t work. The performances are uneven, but overall come off decent at least. The look of the film is just not on point with a mix of beautiful frames and some that look shot by a first-year student. The film as a whole comes off uneven, directionless, and like it may be trying to do more than it is capable of.