Watched Safelight (2015)

Do you watch many movies with subtitles? I don’t. But there are some that don’t have subtitles, so you have to watch them in the original language. It’s an unusual and interesting experience, but we’re not going to talk about it, but about the movie itself.

Evan Peters plays a guy (Charles) with cerebral palsy who works at a gas station, loves taking pictures, and dreams of entering a photo contest. If that doesn’t explain why you should watch it, we’re on different sides. I like him as an actor, plus photography is interesting to me, so I agreed to watch it despite the fact that one eye was looking at the subtitles (yes, in English) and the other at the events that were taking place.

Our hero meets a girl named Vicki (Juno Temple) who, despite her young age, makes a living with her body. Charles works at a gas station, where Vicki finds her customers, so their paths cross, and they become interested in each other. Vicki learns about Charles’s dream, and wants to help him achieve it. From this moment begins the journey of two people who are different in essence, but this is what gives them the basis for friendship. Vicki admires how Charles goes to his goal, and Charles, in turn, sees in Vicki the freedom that he was deprived of because of his illness. So this connection is the basis of the plot.

The entire plot of the film is permeated with drama, as if with thin threads. It seems to hint to us that whatever happens further in the plot – it will cause us to experience, because it is difficult to find any positive when Charles’s father is seriously ill, and Vicki has an unhealthy relationship with some junkie from the gas station. However, the negative moments are diluted with fragments of a road movie, when our heroes go to shoot another wonderful lighthouse, and discover something new about their companion.

I think it’s clear that the film is for a special mood. When you want to see a story about how people, no matter what, go towards their goal. How they, despite the harsh world around them, try to find in it the light of a lighthouse that will show them a new path.

I would give the film a 7 out of 10. Although the story doesn’t have any unexpected twists, sometimes we need exactly this kind of movie – understandable and with good actors.