Half Light

As this film opens, our protagonist’s writer husband complains that his book has been rejected on the grounds that it’s not mysterious enough to be a mystery and insufficiently thrilling to be a thriller. This turns out to be an unwitting moment of self-awareness for this confused second feature from Australian director Craig Rosenberg (‘Hotel de Love’). A miscast Demi Moore plays Rachel, a successful American novelist living in London who decamps to the Scottish wilderness after her son dies and her marriage breaks down. There, she glimpses visions of her dead son and forms a relationship with a swarthy young lighthouse keeper (Hans Matheson). His enigmatic nature does have a hint of mystery, but it’s soon smothered by the faux-sinister behaviour of the other locals, who include a wild-eyed psychic and librarians who drift around in unison with knowing expressions. With its preposterous twists and turns, this could hardly be accused of being dull, but its suspenseful moments are punctuated with too much derivative post-‘Wicker Man’ guff to really deliver.