A Major Disappointment

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

About a troubled woman's(Lina Sundén) desperate journey to find her daughter and the various unusual characters/situations she encounters along the way. Although the budget is low, the interesting script along with the strong, convincing performance of Lina Sundén keep the movie going quite well.. worth a watch!

FEED THE LIGHT is a very low budget Swedish indie horror flick which is heavily indebted to the excellent H.P. Lovecraft story THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. This one's black and white and very artistic visually; it follows a female protagonist around as she hunts for her missing daughter and descends into a hellish netherworld with no escape. The subterranean industrial complex setting is very well realised here and there's a lot of style, albeit without much substance to go along with it. Imagine what the director could acheive with a real budget!

After making countless shorts, Henrik Möller has finally made a his first feature length film. It's both similar and different from his earlier work. It has all the stamps of Möller's earlier films, but they are more polished and developed than before. With the exception of "Inviting the Demon", the films of Möller and his various collaborators have had an extremely rough and raw quality. He has worked with both surrealism and social realism and absurd characters and situations. All of that is present in this film. It all plays out like a sort of mix of all of Möller's previous work. The film is in black and white, with a few tints and splats of color. Some would compare it to Sin City, but to me it seemed more like a silent film that had been colorized by hand. The soundtrack drones with creepy synth music by Testbild and a horrific soundscape by an entire company of different sound designers. A quartet of cleaners that seem to be a mix between the losers from Malmö = Råttkådd and the psychopaths from Möller's animated films like Spritfesten, lumbers around the hallways. They are cleaning up excess dust that draw in "pests"; eldritch shadow people. Lina Sundén's Sara stalks around the halls of the mysterious facility in search for her missing daughter whom she lost in a custody battle with her husband (Patrik Karlson). She finds her ex-husband aged several years and a broken man. He wanted to make a documentary about a mysterious light in his workplace, ending up losing both another worker and his daughter. He and the mysterious janitor (Martin Jirhamn) offers her help to get her back. The facility is filled with odd and deranged people. The boss (Jenny Lampa) keeps a naked man as a pet, a man is seen moaning with a towel on his head and an angry cleaner (Möller himself) rants about Sara having to protect her eyes. What sets it really apart from Henrik Möller's earlier films is the acting and characters. Not that that has been bad in the earlier films, but they were certainly more of people playing exaggerated version of them self and not really challenging parts. This time around, the four main characters, played by Sundén, Jirhamn, Lampa & Karlson, are well rounded characters with more dept too them than any Möller has done before. He and Jirhamn has really done a fantastic work on the characters which, even through I seriously doubted their humanity, seem very human. I must really laud the acting of Lina Sundén and Jenny Lampa who perfectly nailed their parts. Sundén vulnerability and courage contrasted against Lampa's menacing eyes where a perfect contrast. Considering all the horror films Jenny Lampa has been involved in, is she Sweden's first real Scream Queen? I would say so! But I must also say I was blown away by Martin Jirhamn. I've seen him in several of Möller's other films. Unlike the other actors playing main characters, he is an amateur, but he came of as really believable as the morally ambiguous janitor. It was not an easy part, but Jirhamn did it so well I have a hard time imagining another actor in the part. More is implied than shown, but we don't need more. It's all about Sara's search for her child and all it brings about. The tempo is rapid not a single shot wasted. Certainly one of the best Swedish films in the last decade and a must see for lovers of HP Lovecraft and the Silent Hill games.

Henrik Möller is a name I've heard of for years due to his crude animation films - something I made a conscious decision not to watch. It wasn't out of spite or any ill-meaning, I simply never found myself interested in watching them. It's with something like this debut feature, "Lokalvårdaren" (or its English title, which speaks more about the movie but stands out less, "Feed the Light") that I really got curious. It's a low-budget horror from the Southern part of Sweden (made obvious by the accents, of course) that's akin to psychological/supernatural stories like "Session 9".Storywise it keeps itself somewhat familiar. The whole supernatural activities at a weird place/facility/whatever. Sara takes a job as a cleaner at a strange place where her daughter got lost after following her dad to work (he also works there). She comes to learn that the co-workers are far from the most bizarre things she's about to meet. She hears about "the light" - and a supposed other dimension. It strays away to some interesting places here and there, but mostly it remains easy to follow while still keeping us curious. That's possibly one of the main strengths here, that it's not always easy to predict what will happen next.My general distaste for modern Swedish cinema doesn't have much to do with the country or language itself. It's as simple as this: we're mostly horrible at making movies. We're unoriginal and unaware of it. When decent ideas come along, they're usually failing elsewhere. "Lokalvårdaren" stood out with its trailer and it gave me some hope for Swedish independent cinema, and I think it's a lot better than movies like "Mara", "Vittra", "Den som söker" and "Marianne" (all recent Swedish horror/thrillers). It shows a lot more talent and originality (despite feeling familiar in story) than the rest, that's for sure.But what is my overall feeling of the movie? Fact is that I still struggle to fully enjoy it. There are several things that distract me from being fully involved in it. Sometimes it's the characters, sometimes the actors, sometimes it's the few leaps it takes. There are great characters, like Sara herself is quite good, but I'm not entirely sold on the boss character (or the bizarre, nude gimp-like man she has in her office). Acting is also mostly decent, but I felt the dialogue came off as a bit stale or even comedic at times. As for the leaps... well, I'm not entirely sure why certain things happened (and maybe that's on purpose), but without spoiling the scenes I simply felt they brought out more sighs than curiosity.I'm glad the movie has an experimental approach, but at times it felt like means to add something more of interest to the movie, to give it a little unique touch, rather than fully using the style. Simple things like having blood and the daughter's coat in color when the rest isn't is just an old trick that needs some heavy thought behind it to actually mean something. At the same time though, I feel Henrik Möller certainly does best when the movie gets odd.I guess I have to take on the role as a grumpy man yet again, and I guarantee that it's not my intentions upon watching Swedish movies. I will be watching more of Henrik Möller if he comes out with more features, I think he has a few great ideas in him and he's a bigger hope for Swedish horror than most filmmakers right now. The cinematography also stands above most low-budget supernatural horrors that I review. "Lokalvårdaren" might not have won me over, but it has a lot that almost all other Swedish horror movies are missing. If you want a decent supernatural mystery then you should give this a shot though!More reviews at FilmBizarro.com