Light On: When Memory Becomes a Prison

What does it mean to exist when even your own memories won’t recognize you? Juan Octavio Lumé’s Light On, written and produced by Ignacio Verdugo, poses that very question and then locks it in an apartment, wounded and gasping for air.

The film follows Noah, a man who wakes up in a bruised body and a borrowed mind. The walls around him breathe, the shadows watch, and every locked door feels like a metaphor for his fractured identity. It’s a minimalist psychological puzzle that trades explosions for unease.

Lumé’s direction carries a quiet precision, allowing the tension to simmer rather than scream. The casting hits the bullseye performances are hauntingly restrained, anchored by a lead who captures confusion like a man tasting déjà vu for the first time. The pacing, too, walks a careful line: slow enough to let paranoia settle in, brisk enough to never lose its pulse.

Technically, gleams where it should the sound design and original score work like a pulse beneath the film’s skin, giving every creak and whisper the weight of memory. The VFX and makeup are subtle but clever, used sparingly to blur the edge between reality and delusion. If revenge is the driving fuel, atmosphere is the oxygen that keeps this story burning.

Yet and perhaps fittingly for a film titled Light On, there are moments where one wishes the cinematographer had quite literally taken the advice. Certain scenes feel underlit, not in tone but in visibility, muting the visual potential of an otherwise gripping space. The production design, too, could have benefited from more texture,  the apartment, though eerie, lacks that “lived-in” residue of past sins.

Still, these are dim corners in an otherwise luminous concept. Lumé and Verdugo craft a film that’s less about what’s seen than what’s remembered or misremembered.

It’s a claustrophobic riddle of revenge, identity, and the ghosts of manipulation a short that flickers between nightmare and awakening. And by the end, as Noah pieces together who he was, you might just find yourself questioning who you are when the lights go out.