Lights On

Directed by Georgie Cubin

2026

ELK Medium

Lights On is a new 2-minute micro short from Midlands director Georgie Cubin. Nominated for Best Director at the 2021 Midlands Movies Awards Tell Me Who We Are, the filmmaker returns with a story about a teenager who is home alone and starts to worry whether his home is haunted.

It stars 14-year-old Noah Harroe – in his first film role – who is introduced at night watching TV on the sofa. Clearly tired, the teenager is enjoying an old black and white movie on the screen before the TV switches off and he’s left in the dark.

Befuddled by what happened, the boy then searches for the remote and quickly resumes his watching. But suddenly, the lights turn off once more and he again finds himself in the pitch black.

From the beginning, Lights On solidly establishes its set up with some functional shots and a dark (quite literally at times) tone. Camera placement is quite static to begin with, but this choice does help quickly establish the location, which is certainly needed given the short's minimal length.

And Noah Harrow gives a commendable debut performance with subtlety - and without having to rely on scary movie screams.

Returning to the tale, we see him investigating a sound emanating from the kitchen and heads off to find out what he can hear. After discovering a switched-on kettle, he's jolted by a sudden bang and with some quick cuts, we are thrown into the protagonist's confusion as something seems to be spooking the house.

Lights On is a solid short with a good understanding of filmmaking basics. A bit tighter editing could have allowed a few more story beats to play out as the brief runtime unfortunately doesn’t allow us to feel any rising tension the horror genre uses.

And given its really short length, it could be a tad sharper with its editing, adding many more shots and dynamics to really keep it moving as it only has 2-minutes to tell its basic narrative. Despite this however, it does a lot right but I’d really love to see what the production team do next – hopefully, with a longer film to enlighten us with a richer and more fleshed out story.

★★★

3 / 5

Michael Sales

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