Sara (Lina Sundén) is a desperate woman who breaks into the Malmö Institute armed only with a knife and a set of lockpicks. She’s looking for her daughter, whom her recently-divorced husband has taken into the nondescript building. When the Chief (Jenny Lampa) mistakes her for a new hire, Sara finds that Malmo is much weirder than she thought; her job is to sweep up the sparkling dust that drops from the facility’s lights, because the dust “attracts vermin”. She also witnesses one of the other workers get covered with the dust, and the vermin – a swath of darkness – enters the worker’s body and he dies in an explosion of blood.
She enters into an uneasy alliance with the head janitor (Martin Jirhamn), who reveals that things can get even worse: the reason her cell phone was confiscated by the Chief is not because it would interfere with Malmö’s machines, but because the phones can be used to unlock the seemingly nonexistent door to Level Two. Sara has found her husband (Patrik Karlson), now significantly older, because he got lost in Level Two, where time can move… oddly. Level Two is where their daughter is now trapped.
And you do not want to go to Level Three. That’s where the Light lives.
Feed the Light is a fascinatingly low-fi tale of cosmic horror. The black-and-white presentation (except for the occasional burst of color, see the bloody demise above) is going to immediately make most cineastes think of David Lynch, and that’s an association that’s not far wrong, with demented behavior, existential dread and a trove of unanswered questions. It’s not as ultimately incomprehensible as Lynch, but it is as accomplished.
And it’s always good to find a movie that can turn a lack of a multi-million dollar budget into an asset, rather than a disadvantage.
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