Visual Look
The opening credits of the movie had a very nice montage with images of the house and the outdoors, put together with Benny’s crayon drawings. Initially, the audience assumes that these are the drawings of a child, so later on it was quite a surprise to see a man of Benny’s age making these pictures. This is both a good hook for the audience, plus a setup for Benny’s character.
There are some nice shots in this film; the shadows in the nighttime shots looked very good, as did a couple of tracking shots. I especially liked an image of Benny at night, sitting under a blanket with a flashlight. After all, every one of us did that at some point in our childhood.
One of the biggest visual issues in this film is the lighting. Many of the interior shots are underlit, with a bit too much shadow. In addition, there is no consistency; in one scene, the first half is darkly lit, but later on suddenly gets brighter. The lighting issues are also obvious in the scene in which the family’s electricity is cut off, because there is no visible change in the level of light. The room had a large window and it could be argued that the sunlight made up for the lack of electrical light, but the actor’s reactions to a sudden loss of light just aren’t enough to make up for the fact that the audience doesn’t see it happen. In addition, there is a shot in the very next scene where a ceiling fan and its illuminated light can be seen reflected in a picture on the wall. This is a rather glaringly obvious mistake.
One solution would be to re-shoot the “lights out” segments at night or twilight, so that when the lights are turned off, there would be no bright sunlight to worry about. Lighting for movies is always tricky, and doubly so when that lighting has to be changed on camera. In future, it would be a good idea to take some time to practice ahead of time in order to get a good before and after look.
Use of Audio
I really liked the music in the film. There was a great piano piece over the opening credits, as well as some very suspenseful music throughout. In some places there seemed to be a bit too much music, which killed some of the suspense at times.
There were a couple of audio issues, such as a slight hum that could be heard at the beginning and at several points throughout the movie and a couple of instances where the audio got a bit hard to understand. In addition, the similar sounds of the names “Vinnie” and “Benny” sometimes made it difficult to tell who was being spoken about.
