LUMINA - Mark Reviews Movies

Lumina, Goldove Entertainment

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 12, 2024

A small-budget movie with ambitions of inconsistent size, Lumina is primarily a paranoid thriller about alien abduction that seems to be making up its rules, characters, plot, and goals as it goes. One moment, our intrepid heroes are being tracked by shadowy government agents, and in the next, our band of alien-hunters are casually shopping at a clothing store for new outfits before hopping on a plane from California to Morocco. There are so many holes in that simple sequence of events that this whole review could probably be dedicated to digging into them.

Instead, let's ask a few rhetorical questions about it. How determined are those "Men in Black" to stop these characters if the agents let them do some shopping, allow them to board an international flight, and don't even bother tracing the cellphones that our protagonists keep using? Just how desperate are these characters to escape if their big plan is to buy new clothes and even discuss if a particular outfit suits one of them? Is maintaining one's fashion sense really on a high list of priorities after discovering that aliens are real, have abducted one of your friends, can hide in plain sight by way of some kind of psychic possession, and have besuited agents looking for anyone who gets too close to the truth?

The movie, written and directed by Gino McKoy, doesn't stop to consider such basic logic, even though most of the plot amounts to a quartet of characters standing or sitting around talking about all of the things to worry about in their situation. Yes, they also discuss music while driving an RV through Morocco, have debates about relationship issues whenever they get a chance, and do have that strange exchange about the style of a brightly colored dress while planning to go incognito, but mostly, the talk revolves around the mysterious disappearance of Tatiana (Eleanor Williams), whose name will likely be seared into the memory of anyone who watches the movie for days.

That's because her boyfriend Alex (Rupert Lazarus) keeps saying it at different volumes and with different intonations as a surprisingly large chunk of his dialogue. After she disappears in a beam of light following a party at his mansion (He's rich and has abundant free time for reasons that nobody explains, even though someone makes a point to ask), Alex goes outside calling for Tatiana. When he realizes she's gone and the police (All of whom have very non-Californian accents) aren't going to do anything about it, he says her name while asleep and within the dream he has of searching a mysterious underground bunker for Tatiana.

For all of its plotting—involving that international search for answers—and its inevitable trek to an alien world (A prologue gives that away, by the way), McKoy's central aims here seem to be melodrama. Alex is grief-stricken to the point that he wails Tatiana's name at random intervals, and at least the performances are consistent in a shared degree of overacting.

His ex-girlfriend Delilah (Andrea Tivadar) shows up at his mansion hours before Tatiana's disappearance, hoping to get Alex back, and he kicks her out of his life after overhearing a video recording of Delilah saying that she wishes Tatiana would just disappear. Why is that single section of the video playing on a loop? The better question is why Delilah's friend and Alex's housemate Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers) is recording the conversation in the first place, but it's to create the conflict, of course, regardless if it makes any sense.

Patricia's the main character, by the way, although a third-act move makes one wonder if McKoy remembered that while staging a lengthy action sequence on the set where the majority of the budget was spent. The fourth member of the band of alien-seekers is George (Ken Lawson), who shows up to offer some exposition and sticks around to serve as the strained comedic relief.

The only other major players are Thom (Eric Roberts), who worked on a clandestine government operation to reverse-engineer alien technology, and the mysterious Cher (Emily Hall) and the grunting Sonny (Ait ben Azzouz Brahim), who hang out in the Moroccan desert hoping to be re-abducted by aliens. Any other context of their purpose here is left hanging, although more curiosity should be aimed at how a single RV explodes in such spectacular fashion.

Some credit is due to the design of the backdrops—not to the mention the lowered-expectation effects—in the third act of Lumina, although it's easy to see McKoy cheating the camera to use spaces over and over, while thinking about the levels of oxygen in the aliens' compounds is enough to make one's brain burst. Don't think about it. Nobody involved in the movie did, after all.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products