Dark Light (2019) --Movie Plot with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: When Annie moves into her childhood house with her daughter Emily, she notices strange bright lights in the field. When Emily disappears, Annie must get to the bottom of the mystery and save her daughter. 

Have you ever dreamed of escaping city life and just going live in a remote place, far from everyone who keeps interfering in your life?

But what would you do for a living? Well, how about farming? Grow your own food. No need to visit groceries on a regular basis then, right?

Unfortunately, if you have a farm, that’s basically a haven for monsters and aliens. It’s okay though if you have a shotgun stuffed somewhere in your house.

Dark Light could have pretty much been called blinding light. Seriously. The monsters or aliens or whatever they were, have huge spotlights serving as their heads. And for some reason, they don’t directly attack the owner of the house. They stalk for a couple of days, then get inside the house to play hide and seek.

But for anyone else, they attack almost immediately. No games there.

DARK LIGHT Movie Plot 

The story starts with Annie being interrogated by the sheriff on the disappearance of her daughter.

A flashback shows Annie moving into her childhood home with her daughter Emily after her marriage falls apart. It’s not long before she notices strange bright lights in the cornfields while playing hide and seek. In the middle of the night.

More incidents like these happen to the point that Emily one night ends up on the roof. She also keeps getting nosebleeds.

Throughout it all, Annie keeps calling the sheriff who makes light of the situation. For some reason, these incidents don’t occur until Annie moves in.

Until then, the monsters were sleeping, roaming the fields waiting to play hide and seek with Annie.

The sheriff thinks it's some kids but Annie knows something more sinister is going on. Her estranged husband does nothing to help and is smug about cheating on her.

Annie looks for answers online and finds a conspiracy theorist Walter talking about children disappearing and strange lights. She notes down the number but doesn’t contact him yet. She’s waiting until her daughter disappears before making contact.

So the inevitable happens and Emily disappears one night. The monsters had entered the house and Annie was trying to fend them off with a shotgun that was in the house for some reason. Perhaps Annie’s grandmother hated trespassers to the point she would shoot them. Or maybe she too had experienced the strange lights and kept the gun to defend herself.

Anyway, Annie accidentally shoots Paul (or maybe intentionally for not believing in her about the monsters and cheating on her) and is unsuccessful in saving Emily.

Paul blames Annie for shooting her and she is arrested for Emily’s disappearance as well. The sheriff is certain that Annie killed her too and disposed of the body.

DARK LIGHT Ending Explained with Spoilers! 

Annie is jailed and while being transported to prison, the van has an accident and she flees. She returns home, takes a long bath to wash away the jail cell grime. Then she dresses in fresh clothes, retrieves a hidden gun and finally decides to call Walter.

Walter meets with her and explains that he does believe in her about the monster but he wants the glory of finding them himself and locks her in a room filled with pictures of missing children. Annie has already learned that the monster feeds off children’s energy and is more than ever eager to get out to search for her daughter.

Walter has clearly misjudged the monster’s prowess. They chase him to the railway lines where he is snatched by one of the monsters and has his energy sucked out, leaving a scorched body for the police to find.

Upon investigation, they reach his home and inadvertently open the door for Annie to escape. She goes home, fights monsters, her ex is killed, and Emily is found in their lair.

Annie escapes with Emily in a car.

The movie had plenty of cliched dialogues used extensively. There’s the dialogue where Annie tells Emily to go to her room because she has spotted something through the window. Emily shines, “But mom...” Shouldn’t she be responding with “Why? What’s wrong? Should I be hiding somewhere?”

But Mom, what?

Or when Annie is told by the sheriff to drop her weapon and she meekly says, “you don’t understand.”

How about, “there is an intruder in the house! You need to take a look too! Do your investigation properly.”

A lot of time is wasted with unnecessary words. Of course, the sheriff isn’t going to understand. Don’t try lengthy dialogues. If she had to try, she should have started with what was really going on.

The ending was rushed and in a blink and miss scene, you see how Annie comes up with the idea of defeating the monsters. Yep, burn the house down.

The movie could have been better with better dialogues and a smoother ending.

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