Light From Light (Paul Harrill, 2019)

Here's an instance in which I wish I'd kept better notes, and why I now try to write a little something about almost everything I see. I watched Paul Harrill's previous film, Something, Anything, which like his latest was acclaimed in certain circles as a determinedly small, heartfelt film about an ordinary woman experiencing a crisis of faith in a small-town Tennessee setting. But unlike most of my peers, I did not like Something, Anything, and I gave it a [4] rating. As it stands, I barely remember anything about it, which I suppose says something.

Throughout a lot of Light From Light, I thought I was going to have a similar reaction, and truth be told, my 'pro' / [7] rating is right on the line, and could teeter over into a 'mixed' / [6] if I were ever to give it another go. There are things about the film I find overly precious, such as its noodling folk-guitar soundtrack and its frequent close-ups of leaves and other such rustic Southern accouterments. Harrill is obviously a regionalist, someone making private, handcrafted independent cinema in the vein of Eagle Pennell, but he sometimes seems determined to force the issue.

Nevertheless, I found myself appreciating Light From Light overall as a small-scale study of loss, a graceful circumstantial encounter between two individuals at crossroads in their lives. Sheila (Marin Ireland) is a car rental employee who has had certain questionable brushes with the supernatural, which have led her to work with professional ghost-hunting teams in the past. (She is "between teams" at the moment.) A local priest hears her talking about this on a public radio interview and contacts her to help a parishioner, Richard (Jim Gaffigan), whose wife died in a plane crash not quite a year ago, and thinks she might be trying to contact him from the spirit world.

Harrill is wise to subdue all of the customary "ghostbusters" nonsense such a scenario could generate. Neither Sheila nor Richard are particularly certain they believe in ghosts, and as we learn late in the film, Richard is not even sure he believed in his wife while she was alive. The concept of exploring the everyday world for signs becomes a hermeneutic for Harrill to explore our basic coping mechanisms, and how we have to grow when they no longer suffice. This dynamic is mirrored with Sheila's son Owen (Josh Wiggins) who can't decide whether it's worth it to start a relationship with his best friend Lucy (Atheena Frizzell) given that she's headed off to college soon.

Toward its conclusion, Light From Light begins displaying a bit of a similarity to certain Kelly Reichardt films, and the comparison is not particularly flattering. Reichardt is capable of orchestrating private experiences and micro-affect within a wide canvas that showcases the expansive impact of those feelings, whereas Harrill seems constitutionally bound to keep things minor. But at the same time, Light From Light takes this miniaturized universe and introduces the supernatural into it, or perhaps even a deity. Harrill seems to suggest that if there is in fact a God, it can only be a God of small things.