White Noise 2: The Light (2007)

"If you save, you must kill."
- Henry Caine (Craig Fairbrass)

At a glance: Nathan Fillion stars as a man whose near-death experience gives him the power to tell which people are about to die, in this stylishly entertaining but uneven supernatural horror film

Abe (Nathan Fillion) watches his wife and son die at the hands of a deranged gunman. Distraught, he attempts suicide, but is pulled back from the dead. Afterward, he sees strange auras around some people. Realizing that these auras mean the people are about to die, he finds purpose in life again by saving them – but it’s not as straightforward as all that. Fillion is a powerful actor who runs from scene to scene, saving lives, and does his best with a script that occasionally dips into silliness. Katee Sakhoff (Starbuck from the new Battlestar Galactica series) is wonderful to look at and does an admirable job as Abe’s love interest. Nothing bad can be said about the imaginative, stylish direction by Patrick Lussier; he sets the mood perfectly and allows his creative camera angles and beautiful (and beautifully gruesome) images to shine. The scares are mostly generated by the occasional appearance of gruesome walking corpses. They seem incongruous (but effective) in a movie that is mostly a serious attempt to look at the phenomena of near-death experiences. Trivia: Listen closely to find the tiny reference to Fillion’s work as Captain Reynolds in the television series Firefly. Rating: 2.5 of 4

"...Fillion's stellar work ensures that one can generally overlook the film's various inadequacies..."
- David Nusair (Reel Film Reviews)

"A few cheap jolts, a handful of clever ideas, and just enough energy and creativity to make it across the finish line."
- Scott Weinberg (FEARnet)