Neon Lights Review: Psychological Thriller Quickly Loses The Plot

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Psychological thrillers live and die by the minds of their protagonist and, when those prove untrustworthy, the audience is left with nothing but themselves to make sense of what's on the screen before them. In Neon Lights, Clay Amani (Dana Abraham) is at the center of the narrative and can be seen as a typical unreliable narrator — if there were any narrative cohesion to what is happening in the hour and a half put on film. Neon Lights shows promise, but it quickly buckles under the weight of an identity crisis. The film is unsure if wants to be a portrait of a man on the verge, a slasher, or a psychological chamber piece, and it ultimately fails to live up to any of these ideas.

Neon Lights follows Clay, a man on the brink of losing the CEO position at his company Tempest Tech and also, quite possibly, his mind. His own ambiguous mental health issues plague him during an interview early in the film, one that quickly goes off the rails when the reporter refuses to lob softball questions his way. After this breakdown, Clay goes off the grid, retreating to an estate where he aims to reconnect with his family and ground himself amidst the tumultuous days before Tempest's IPO. What begins as a family reunion, though, quickly takes a dark turn, devolving into a haphazard nightmare.

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While Neon Lights initially appears to have quite a lot going on (and the set-up itself quite promising), it literally loses the plot as, like Clay himself, the narrative spins out of control. Threads that are seemingly important — including the tech company subplot and invasive flashes of a therapy session that only makes sense at the end of the film — are