At First Light is a 2018 thriller about a high school senior, who has an encounter with mysterious lights that appear over her small town.
Aliens in movies tend to fall within two distinct camps, with visitors from outer space arriving to either conquer our pathetic species or otherwise help it, even if that’s not always easy to accomplish. If there’s common ground between the two, it’s at least a given that the aliens will have presence. In writer/director Jason Stone‘s latest curious entry in the mix, it’s anything but, with the aliens simply a catalyst rather than a subject, making At First Light an unconventional sci-fi film with a string of interesting ideas that might not always click as they could but is nonetheless a worthy, if divisive pick.
In the foothills of a small midwestern American town, kids from the local high school meet in the outskirts for a party. In the crowd are Sean (Théodore Pellerin), a gangly good-natured boy who looks after his younger troublesome brother and their catatonic grandmother, and Alex (Stefanie Scott), a pretty girl with a boyfriend who Sean has had a crush on since they were children but can’t bring himself to tell her how he feels, even if she already knows. It’s pretty standard stuff, except up in the skies, where things are not. A series of small bright lights break from the clouds when Alex (separating from the gang with her beau) is off swimming in the nearby quarry. When she emerges from the water, she is changed, imbibed with a stunning array of incredible powers. With only Sean to call, the two eventually go on the run as authorities give chase.
It might be easy to call this a superhero origin story as Alex certainly comes equipped as such, able to move objects with her mind in some rather heady destructive ways. She has further abilities as well, as seen when she encounters Sean’s grandmother, but the film leaves most other tropes of the genre to the wayside. Alex, sort of akin to Rogue from X-Men, is not entirely safe to be around, radiating a toxicity that soon comes to damage Sean, leaving him to make a difficult choice.
You might be feeling some twinge of familiarity in all this and you wouldn’t be far off, Stone drawing from a number of highly influential titles to tell his own bend on the story. However, there are plenty of twists in the road to keep it his own, even if some aren’t developed much beyond their immediate needs. This isn’t a visual effects-driven story, the movie nearly devoid of anything involving aliens. It’s much more a love story, the forces at work both from afar and close by serving as a kind of metaphor for their relationship.
Unfortunately, the film is too loose with all of this, Stone wound up in his ideas, and too serious about the message, leaving the film curiously flat, the whole thing hard to get all that invested in. There is very little to connect to, Sean’s familial responsibilities and his love for Alex only cursorily developed before the story has to move on to its sci-fi core. Even its cosmic ending, homaging Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, lacks the emotional punch it seems angling for, despite having its heart in the right place.
Still, At First Light is not without some genuinely good moments, with Stone best as a director, the film often feeling authentic, especially in the first thirty minutes. It’s here in fact where you’ll wish the story stuck, doing away with all the heavenly lights and their consequences, simply letting Sean and Alex be themselves. They are ultimately far more interesting than what changes them.