Writers: David Groom and Michael Groom
Director: Michael Groom
It may be October at the London Breeze Film Festival 2024, but the lights are up on Oxford Street, festive window displays have been up for weeks and for the two characters in David and Michael Groom’s Between the Lights it is definitely Christmas as they enjoy their first date discussing their favourite Christmas films and memories. This supernatural drama credibly builds the connection between Jay and Alice whose relationship is crucial to this unfolding time-spanning love story, and while its low budget is sometimes obvious (flapping curtains on strings for example), the Grooms build an intriguing and ominous tone from the start.
Meeting for a date just before Christmas, Alice jokes about a ghost in her house but when Jay goes away to his aunt’s, Alice starts to hear strange thumping noises when she’s left alone and panics. Meanwhile Jay is followed by a strange man that he starts to see everywhere as flashforwards imply he’s involved in the man’s death. With two more Christmases ahead they both start to wonder what is real.
Between the Lights is certainly an unusual romantic drama aimed at those who have enjoyed the likes of The Time Traveller’s Wife or even Ghost, but while it is slightly higher concept than these equivalents, it is the easy chemistry between actors Ines Dr Clerq and Samuel Edward-Cook that help to establish this scenario and create investment in this couple even when the script sometimes let them down. The rapport between Alice and Jay is still well conveyed through a long first date and several subsequent conversations that develop their connection as the basis for the film’s more unusual plot points.
The film spends most of its time in the early part of Jay and Alice’s relationship and their first Christmas together, primarily focused on Jay’s experience as a medium which the couple discuss and test at length. It takes some while before the action really begins, more than an hour into the film, before some of these early hints start to pay off and the purpose of Between the Lights take shape.
David Groom and Michael Groom’s film is a restrained affair both in its love story and its ghostly aspect, never quite tipping over into any kind of specific horror or spine-chilling creep, but relying on rather peaceable discussion between Alice’s scientific, rationalist perspective and Jay’s equally unshowy spiritual claims.
It spends too much time on their early relationship and not quite enough on the later years when things have changed which reduces more tension than it builds so if you are looking for a Christmas scare, this is never quite M.R. James, but the performances from De Clerq and Edward-Cook pull you along this multi-timeline narrative even if its belief in the afterlife and the presence of spirits is rather non-committal in the end.
Between the Lights is screening at the London Breeze Film Festival 2024 from 24-27 October.
