Sheila (Marin Ireland) is the lead character of Light from Light, an employee at a car rental company and also a paranormal investigator. Well, sort of, she isn't working for any paranormal research groups right now, she's merely working her day job and looking after her High School Senior son, Owen (Josh Wiggins). But grieving Richard (Jim Gaffigan), who lost his wife in a plane crash a few months prior, recruits her help to determine if the ghost of his wife is lingering around their house. It's an unorthodox job Sheila takes on without accepting any sort of financial payment just as Owen begins to struggle with his plans for the future, including his potential attraction to his friend Lucy (Atheena Frizzell).
This plot means Sheila is grappling with the past (the possible presence of the ghost of Richard's wife), the present (where does she stand in terms of her devotion to her job as a paranormal investigator) and the future (what's gonna happen with her son). Grappling with these parts of her life result in a story that carries a pervasively grim tone, an appropriate move given what kind of somber material Sheila and Richard are dealing with. As executed here, such a tone has varying degrees of success, with the less successful examples of this tone in writer/director Paul Harrill's script rendering portions of this feature overly stiff and hard to tap into the characters on a dramatic level.
This is especially apparent in an early scene where Lucy and Owen confront the idea of them being romantically attracted to each as they exchange rigid dour dialogue that just doesn't sound organic coming from the mouths of teenagers and isn't quite well-written enough to justify the dissonance Also a problem in this specific scene is that the dialogue doesn't reflect their individual personalities successfully. Through this conversation, you get their differing positions on the topic of if they want to date or not, but you don't get to understand who they are as people beyond that. It feels like Owen, in explaining why he doesn't want to date Lucy, is just stiffly reciting his character motivation rather than speaking in dialogue that allows us the chance to more subtly understand him as a human being.
Unfortunately, there are other instances throughout Light from Light where its adherence to using a dour tone to explore people grimly coming to terms with their past, present and future comes at the cost of actually establishing the humanity of those same people. On the other hand, this dour approach to the dialogue actually works in the more intimate scenes with the adult characters, which tend to take on a more specific character-driven quality and have a reason for the grim tone compared to the teenage dialogue exchanges which seem to follow the dour aesthetic in an obligatory fashion. This is particularly apparent in a nighttime dialogue exchange between Richard and Sheila that sees them opening up about their past to each other in a moving manner. Harrill shows off his best visual sensibilities as a filmmaker in this sequence as he smartly keeps the camera focused exclusively on close-up shots of these two characters opening up to one another.
He also positions them against a pitch-black nighttime backdrop that makes for an appropriately bleak visual accompaniment to their emotional openness. Harrill's directing as well as Greta Zozula's cinematography also excel in terms of creating a compelling visual atmosphere reliant on grimness in daytime exterior shots that typically see the Tennesse outdoors cloaked in a blanket of fog. That fog does a great job of evoking a sense of solemness and it especially comes in handy during a scene of Richard and Sheila traveling through a forest. It's a pivotal sequence enhanced in its emotional impact by how dialogue is eschewed entirely in favor of letting the subtly morose nature of these fog-covered environments take center-stage.
This particular scene, like a number of other noteworthy sequences in Light from Light, is also aided by the performances of Marin Ireland and Jim Gaffigan, both of whom deliver subdued turns that still discernably convey what kind of emotional problems their characters are going through. This is especially true of Gaffigan, who is remarkable in how well he captures how Richard has had to live with his grief for months on end now. Richard has the sorrow stemming from his wife's passing basically caked into his system by now and Gaffigan captures that quite well. Light from Light could have stood to have more humanity to accompany its grim aesthetic but in its best moments, it's dour trappings are put to powerful use.
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