A Title That Doubles as a Threat
Some movies promise darkness; All Light Will End promises extinction. Sadly, the light that goes out isn’t metaphorical — it’s the one inside your soul after enduring 85 minutes of this existential punishment disguised as a psychological thriller.
Written and directed by Chris Blake in his feature debut (and possibly the reason he hasn’t had many since), All Light Will End wants to be a moody, genre-bending meditation on trauma and storytelling. What it is, instead, is a cinematic sleep aid masquerading as a horror film.
It’s the kind of movie that thinks being confusing equals being clever, that endless dream sequences equal depth, and that jump scares involving deer count as “psychological tension.”
The Plot (Such as It Is): Freud Meets Hallmark Channel
The premise sounds promising on paper: Savannah Martin (Ashley Pereira), a young, successful horror novelist, returns home to her small Tennessee town for a weekend getaway with friends. Her father (Andy Buckley), the local police chief, is dealing with a string of grisly murders. And wouldn’t you know it — Savannah’s “dark imagination” seems to mirror these crimes a little too closely.
Cue ominous music. Cue whiskey. Cue an 85-minute montage of Savannah staring into the middle distance like she’s just realized she left the oven on back in Nashville.
What unfolds is a narrative so disjointed it feels like someone dropped a stack of film reels and reassembled them alphabetically. We jump between Savannah’s “reality,” her dreams, and her father’s murder investigation with all the grace of a drunk editor using iMovie for the first time.
Savannah’s friends — an interchangeable group of horny twenty-somethings who look like they wandered in from a CW casting call — spend most of their screentime drinking, flirting, and narrating campfire stories that go nowhere. Meanwhile, her father walks around crime scenes looking as confused as the audience, muttering lines like, “This doesn’t make sense,” which, ironically, is the film’s unofficial tagline.
Eventually, the big reveal comes: Savannah’s horrifying dreams might not be fiction after all. Something from her childhood — something dark — is haunting her. Unfortunately, by the time we get there, most viewers have already been spiritually exorcised from caring.
Characters Who Could Be Replaced by Houseplants
Let’s be charitable and call the acting “uneven.”
Ashley Pereira, in the lead role, spends most of the film oscillating between mild bewilderment and mild hysteria — the emotional range of someone trying to remember whether they fed the cat. Her character is supposed to be a “brilliant writer tortured by her own mind,” but she mostly just looks like she needs a nap and a multivitamin.
Andy Buckley, best known as David Wallace from The Office, plays her dad with the same confused-but-polite energy he brought to every scene with Michael Scott. You can practically see him thinking, “How did I end up in this?” — a question that echoes through every frame of this movie like a ghostly voice from the beyond.
The supporting cast, including Sam Jones III (Smallville), Sarah Butler (I Spit on Your Grave), and Alexandra Harris, exist purely to fill space and occasionally scream. They’re the cinematic equivalent of decorative pillows: they look fine, but serve no real purpose.
By the time the psychiatrist (John Schuck) appears, spouting dime-store Freud about trauma and repression, you’re half-convinced he’s just here to diagnose the audience for watching this.
The Horror: Now With 100% Less Scares
Let’s address the elephant — or rather, the ghostly deer — in the room. For a film marketed as horror, All Light Will Endseems aggressively uninterested in frightening anyone.
We get a handful of jump scares that wouldn’t startle a toddler, plus a few dream sequences where people walk slowly toward things while whispering ominously. It’s as if someone watched The Babadook once, took notes in crayon, and said, “Yeah, I can do that — but cheaper.”
The cinematography tries its best to create atmosphere: muted tones, flickering lights, foggy landscapes. But you can only shoot so many shadows before realizing your script has less substance than a séance pamphlet.
Even the murders — theoretically the backbone of a thriller — are so poorly handled that you’ll find yourself rooting for the killer, just so something happens.
The Editing: Because Time Is an Illusion
The editing deserves special mention, if only because it feels like an avant-garde protest against narrative coherence. Scenes begin and end abruptly, transitions appear without warning, and characters teleport across locations like low-budget specters.
The movie constantly blurs the line between dream and reality, which could’ve been interesting if the director hadn’t used that as an excuse to avoid explaining anything. Instead, we’re trapped in an 85-minute fever dream where logic is optional and continuity is an urban legend.
It’s like Inception if Inception had been written during a NyQuil binge and filmed in a Tennessee AirBnB.
The Tone: Moody, Broody, and Deeply Confused
All Light Will End wants to be a psychological study of guilt and trauma. But instead of exploring those ideas, it just keeps showing Savannah clutching her head like she’s got a migraine from the plot.
There’s also an undercurrent of sexual tension between her and nearly every male character, which feels less like subtext and more like the director ran out of script pages. The film tries to juggle mystery, eroticism, and family drama — but instead of blending genres, it drops them all like juggling knives and cuts itself repeatedly.
At times, it even tries to be meta — hinting that Savannah’s horror writing is inspired by her subconscious crimes. This could’ve worked as a clever commentary on the relationship between creativity and trauma… if the film hadn’t treated it like a Scooby-Doo twist.
The Climax (or Whatever That Was)
The big “reveal” — that Savannah’s dreams are manifestations of her suppressed memories and that she might have been involved in the killings — lands with the emotional impact of a deflated balloon.
We get flashbacks, screaming, and a final “shocking” moment that feels like the movie trying to wake itself up. By the end, everything blurs together — dreams, reality, and the audience’s will to live.
The final scene hints at ambiguity, possibly setting up a sequel. If that sequel ever gets made, I hope it’s a courtroom drama about the prosecution of everyone involved in this film.
The Title: A Promise It Keeps Too Well
To its credit, the title All Light Will End is accurate. About halfway through, you can feel the light leaving your eyes — the brightness of hope, the flicker of excitement, the will to see this through.
It’s not the kind of horror that makes you scream; it’s the kind that makes you sigh. Loudly. Repeatedly.
Final Thoughts: A Thriller Without Thrills
In the end, All Light Will End feels like a film student’s term project that somehow wandered onto Amazon Prime. It wants to be atmospheric, introspective, and unsettling. What it actually is: underwritten, over-edited, and terminally self-serious.
It’s a thriller that doesn’t thrill, a mystery that doesn’t mystify, and a horror film that couldn’t scare a Roomba.
If you’re looking for a movie that combines existential dread with the pacing of a Sunday nap, congratulations — you’ve found it. But for everyone else, heed this warning: don’t let the title fool you. The only thing that ends here is your patience.
Final Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
(One out of five ghostly deer — because while the light ends, your suffering does not.)
