‘Lumina’ Review – Blinded By The Lights And An Empty Vessel Of A Story

“I want to believe” feels like the moniker for Lumina. The film’s central tenet becomes a mission to believe that someone who vanished in a blinding light can be found. It is a story about believing in the unknown and that conspiracies are more than conspiracies. When a strange light results in a girl’s disappearance into thin air, questions circulate about a possible abduction by aliens. Paranoia and trauma fuel one man’s mission to find his missing girlfriend. The stakes are high, and a web of conspiracies are exciting plot threads, except when they are plain like vanilla. I wanted to believe Lumina could be something promising, but this over-stuffed and tonally cluttered story plays like a hackneyed episode of a CW show from years ago.

From the start, there is an issue with the script. The tone of the film is a jumbled mess. On the one hand, the film proposes to be a thriller, with the influences of aliens and government conspiracies. But then, on the other hand, the film slows its pace to almost a baby-like crawl and injects forced drama and love triangles. The story stems from Alex (Rupert Lazarus) leading his friends to find his missing girlfriend, Tatiana (Eleanor Williams). It almost takes on a teen-drama fever dream, with moody characters, periods of melancholy, and staring at the swimming. Mixing genres never hurt anyone, but poor execution can be a whopper.

For the cast’s part, many of them are playing it more seriously than the material has to offer. The film wants to be a straightforward thriller, but the characters are thin sketches and often embrace the cliché. The flimsy nature of the script dampens any attempts at seriousness. Only two actors embrace the material for what it is and deliver memorable performances. First is Ken Lawson, who plays the self-described conspiracy theorist George. The second is Eric Roberts, who hams it up as Thom, an ex-government employee who seems to be teetering on the edge. Both imbue a sense of fun that is otherwise missing from this exploit.

That is not to dismiss the other players in the ensemble, but the film lacks any hard-fought motivation other than the superficial actions in the script. The pacing, as a result, feels tedious. When the actions begin to accelerate, a quick detour to some manufactured drama is added to give the story a longer runtime. These efforts provide little in terms of characterization or moving the story forward to anything surprising. Audiences may find themselves waiting for Scully and Mulder to pop up and liven the pace because, at times, the film strives to be like The X-Files, but it feels more like clunky fan fiction.

Lumina starts in the desert and then works backward through a flashback until we arrive at the present. The journey zig-zags from modernistic mansions to cluttered government warehouses before finally arriving in the desert wasteland. Along the way, challenges emerge, which feel manufactured, not in terms of the story’s context, but manufactured because the script calls for it. These ‘manufactured challenges’ occur when the characters face obstacles that seem contrived and do not naturally occur in the story. The lack of an organic flow makes the story feel like an orchestrated game of checkers. We move from place to place with little forethought or clever design.

Alien films are tricky because so much has been covered. There is little fertile ground save for the reshuffling of previous material. Here in Lumina, there is a soft effort to make a personal connection between the conspiracy and the characters. However, the film’s path is full of never-ending twists in the road, unexpected turns, and revelations that keep the audience more distracted than engaged. By the time the film ends, there is a feeling of being off-balance caused by the rapid surprises and shifts in the narrative.

The biggest challenge for Lumina is the scope of its ambitions. The film tries to spin off into a myriad of directions, ranging from government secrets to alien menaces. These are all valid angles, but the problem lies in the execution, which is sloppy and, at times, distracted. Audiences will likely guess the ending before the end of the first act. The lack of subtlety is to the detriment of the film. While there are some twists, they arrive a little too late to make any real contact.

Lumina is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of Goldove Entertainment.