The Harsh Light of Day Review

If you’re making a movie should have at least one of the following: a) a decent script or b) decent actors. If you’ve got both, you’re laughing, if you’ve only got one of those two things, then if it’s good enough, it can make up for the failings of the other. If you have neither a well written script nor actors that can’t act, you’re in trouble.

Unfortunately, The Harsh Light of Day falls into this latter category. The film is a low-budget horror in which a writer is brutally attacked in his own home by video camera-wielding masked thugs. His wife is killed and he is left paralysed. A deal with a mysterious stranger, however, offers him the chance for revenge.

Another rule for filmmaking that I’m making up and applying to this film right now is that if you’re going to tackle a well-trodden genre, you should have at least have something interesting and/or vaguely original to show us. The Harsh Light of Day flagrantly disregards this long-standing rule I’ve just made up. It’s a film about a certain type of parasitic monster that popular culture has got itself all in a hot sweat about recently. It doesn’t explicitly name this monster, so neither have I, but believe you me, you’ve probably seen at least one film/read one book/watched one TV programme featuring the creature in the last couple of years and if you haven’t, I envy you. The Harsh Light of Day does nothing with this monster that we haven’t already seen seventeen times already.

Dan Richardson and Giles Alderson, who play the film’s lead roles are very wooden and spout some really weakly written lines, penned by director Oliver S Milburn. It may only be seventy-eight minutes long, but it felt like a drag. Clearly the filmmakers were struggling to stretch the plot over that brief a length of time, as there a more than couple of flashback/nightmare montages that add nothing more than a couple of minutes to the film’s duration. They are often laughably bad – at one point, our blurry, shaky camera zooms in dramatically… on a packet of bird feed! Shock, horror!

I believe that there’s always something to like in every film (there just has to be, right?). In The Harsh Light of Day, it’s a brief sequence towards the end seen through the video lens of one of the home invaders. Although the ‘found footage’ thing has been as done to undeath as the film’s monsters, this brief sequence was well constructed and even approached being a bit scary.

Apart from that, there is little to recommend the film. It doesn’t feel good to criticise a debutant director who clearly didn’t have a lot of money to splash around, but hopefully Milburn will return in the future to deliver on the glimmers of promise he shows in The Harsh Light of Day with something better written or with better actors and perhaps something original to say.