Mark Reviews Movies: LIGHT OF MY LIFE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2019

Casey Affleck hasn't fully thought through the world of Light of My Life, which he wrote and directed, but that really doesn't matter. This world, ravaged by a virus that killed off most of the women on the planet, is simply the backdrop for a more intimate story about a father raising his 8-year-old daughter completely on his own.

That they're trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world, where the fact that the father's child is a girl puts her at risk, is almost a secondary challenge. The real challenge is that the father barely knows how to talk to his daughter about anything other than how to survive. As for ensuring that she becomes her own person—apart from the hardships of the world and the fear that she will be a target and his own feelings of needing to protect her from all of that and more—and her own woman, dad hasn't even considered beginning to think about that.

From the film's start, with a lengthy storytelling session between the father and the daughter in a tent in the middle of the woods, Affleck's screenplay firmly establishes this tale as a kind of parable. It's much more about the particulars of the relationship at the heart of this story, as well as how that story is told (The daughter complains that, while the father promised the story of a female fox on Noah's Ark, he instead told one about the fox's male partner). It's much less about the specific details of the world surrounding these characters.

As such, we're not looking too deeply into the logic of a world where most women and girls have been dead for eight years. Affleck explains and shows the basics, which are exactly what we might expect. Society seems to go on, albeit with a lot of government intervention and regulation. That only matters to some, though. The male survivors of the plague almost exclusively fall into two categories: sticking to towns, where jobs are still to be had, or scavenging across the countryside.

In terms of their lives now, the father, referred to as "Dad" and played by Affleck in a reserved but forceful performance, and his daughter Rag (Anna Pniowsky, making an impressive debut), a nickname that has stuck (Tellingly, it came from a doll), fall into that second category. The barebones plot has the two moving from one location to another, staying for various lengths of time, being discovered, and moving on to the next stop.

Their temporary home in the middle of a forest is put in jeopardy by the arrival of a stranger, an old man who seems harmless to Rag, who keeps her hair short and dresses like a boy. Dad assumes that one old man has at least a few old-man friends with him. He's also convinced that the stranger, who mentioned that Dad's "son"—as the father has to refer to Rag, lest anyone try to take or harm her—looks "comely," knew Rag is a girl. That's trouble in a world filled with men, who likely haven't seen a woman or a girl in almost a decade. As for what such men would do to or with Rag if they discovered the truth, Affleck leaves that to our imagination, because Dad certainly isn't going to explain it to his daughter.

They come across an abandoned house, which Rag believes could make a more permanent residence. Dad is skeptical, as he always is, but they search the building and the property and decide it might make for a less-temporary place to live. While Rag investigates the toys and the clothes in one of the bedrooms, Dad begins to find hiding spots, to hide weapons, and to plot escape routes for when what he believes to be the inevitable happens. He's mortified when Rag shows a liking for a jacket she found, covered in sparkly things.

When the two aren't on the move, the story pauses for a series of conversations between father and daughter. They're relatively simple things, although they're given more weight by the circumstances, but they reveal the dynamics of this father-daughter relationship with easy, straightforward clarity.

Dad is constantly explaining his plans and the tactics that Rag should use to avoid getting into danger, but Rag is rarely part of these discussions. They're simply lectures. The girl is curious about a time before this mess, so Dad tells a story about Rag's mother (played by Elisabeth Moss in flashbacks), which becomes a discussion of what Rag do if something happens to him. He dodges that, but it still leaves her reliant her father to make anything of her survival and whatever life she could have. Questions about the world and the men still living in it arise, and Dad evades them, only getting into specifics during a mostly unprompted talk about sex and puberty, which is about as awkward as one might imagine coming from this character.

Most importantly on a thematic level, there's the story at the beginning, as well as a refrain of it later. In that second telling, Rag gets a chance to tell Dad what happened with the female fox, while the male thought he was saving the day, and, hence, teach him something about letting himself be in the background of someone else's story. Slowly and methodically, Light of My Life reveals the strengths and the shortcomings of this bond, put under pressure by the world at large. More to the point, it's tested by the unwillingness of a father to let his daughter become the woman she has to be for herself.

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