Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Prism of Light (2019)

Two high schoolers have to make amends before they die in a building fire.

Prism of Light poses a problem for me. A well-made film it has some problems that kind of hobble it.

While I have no problem with the basic premise, one teen blames the other for the death of his sister in a car accident, what happens after that doesn’t quite work. Trapped in a school building the pair go into emergency escape stairs and instead of going down they do up. Why they don’t go down doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense (and never mind he stairs are all cinder block so won't burn)  with the result that instead of being moved by the exchange between the boys you end up screaming at the screen.

While I suspect that this partly due to the low budget and needing to shoot the film around the locations at hand, the result is a film that just misses. Having tried to do similar things with several films I several years ago, I understand what happened and why. I also know that sometimes that even being forgiving as an audience member isn’t enough.

That said, on a technical level Prism of Light is very well made. Outside of the narrative problem the film works. It’s good enough that when director Alec Ybarra and his crew do their next film I want to see it.

No comments:

Post a Comment