A BIT OF LIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

A Bit of Light, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

A Bit of Light gives us the story of a woman's pain, regret, and self-loathing about being an alcoholic, losing her children as a result, and trying to get to the point where recovery is possible for her. She has a support system, even if she won't admit that the people in her life genuinely want to help to see her through this, but the drama of this apparently isn't enough for screenwriter Rebecca Callard.

The script here, based on the writer's play, has a notable outlier among its cast—a character who shows up with no other purpose than to be the main character's champion and conscience, while also making sure she knows that someone could and would want to depend on her again. That this character is a kid, a 13-year-old boy, makes some sense, but that the teenager almost seems to possess some kind of magical degree of empathy makes his existence in this story completely transparent.

Beyond that, the kid has obvious problems of his own, but because Callard and director Stephen Moyer focus on the struggling Ella (Anna Paquin), it's not as if her young friend actually needs any more development than how he can serve his purpose for helping the protagonist's problems. It's difficult to believe the movie's sincerity about the necessity of people really seeing and helping each other when the story is so dismissive of a kid who clearly needs to be seen and helped.

Until the teen's arrival in the story, the material is engaging as a study of someone who knows she has a problem but isn't quite willing to admit it. Instead, she takes out all of that frustration with herself on others, because there's only so much of an emotional beating she can give herself.

The targets include her father Alan (Ray Winstone), a man of seemingly infinite patience. The performances here are quite good, but watching Winstone play against type so convincingly is a pleasant surprise. The actor, best known for playing rough-and-tough men of highly questionable behavior and morals, is subdued, perfectly ordinary, and almost heartbreaking as a man who nearly lost it all to drinking in his own day, before deciding to get sober. Despite that, he is now a widower, hasn't had contact with his two granddaughters since Ella's issues became too much for the kids, and is quietly terrified that he might lose his daughter to her many demons.

Alan has good reason to worry, too. Ella is stuck. Her ex-husband Joseph (Youssef Kerkour) doesn't want her to see their children because of how Ella's drunken behavior escalated, and he's dating Bethan (Pippa Bennett-Warner), who loves the girls and wants what's best for them, too. Ella can't see that, of course, but the way she gradually does learn that, as Joseph and Bethan take Ella's feelings into account and go out of their way to make certain she knows it, gets at a core idea of how warped a perspective self-hatred can bring.

Meanwhile, Ella says she attends AA meetings, but the one time we see her at one, she sits in silence and barely seems to be listening. When Alan drops her off for another, Ella leaves as soon as her dad drives off, heading directly to a local park where she regularly took her daughters. She haunts the place, watching mothers keeping tabs on their children and kids playing. We might think she's waiting for her own kids to show up one day, but that turns out to be a wrong assumption. No, Ella just wants to wallow in witnessing everything she has lost, so how can she move forward if she keeps looking back?

That's how she meets Neil (Luca Hogan), the teenage boy who has been watching Ella watching all of this happiness and becoming quite miserable from the sight of it. The kid starts talking to her one day, and after getting over the awkwardness of the idea and accepting that the boy is very upfront about his thoughts, Ella opens up to Neil more and more. The teen somehow knows exactly what to say to Ella to make her feel better about herself and to have some hope that she could be a mother again.

In theory, this relationship is odd and blatantly pushing Ella in the direction she needs to go, and in practice, it's slightly tolerable, because Paquin portrays desperate loneliness well enough to convince us Ella would connect with this kid and Hogan brings a certain specificity to Neil's own isolation. As for how and why Neil becomes so attached to this stranger, the kid insists his parents don't care about what he gets up to, and he repeatedly tells Ella he wishes she were his mother.

The relationship throws a significant wrench into the otherwise grounded drama of the story. It's troubling, not only because of what the mystery surrounding the kid implies about his life (not to mention the notion of an adult woman forming such a close bond with a teenage boy, which the movie dances around), but also—and mainly—on account of how Neil becomes a means of Ella's growth. A Bit of Light is generous about its other characters, but Neil's unceremonious exit from the story, after his work is finished, only highlights how little care the movie has for him as more than a storytelling device.

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