Inspired by the Marfa Lights in southwest Texas, The Ghost Lights is a small, low budget film that has big ideas, but not the means to execute them fully. Alex (Katreeva Phillips), a big city journalist from a small Texas town flew away years ago, but is back in town for the funeral of her father (John Francis McCullagh), who died under mysterious circumstances. The opening sequence, in which Alex learns from her sister that their father’s funeral was held two days before she arrived in town comes across as nonsensical, illogical, and forced, existing only to put Alex in the situation she is in.

She goes to her father’s home to help with packing up and finds a mysterious tape labeled “The Ghost Lights – October 15, 1978,” to which she begins to listen and discovers her father interviewing miner Mario (Billy Blair) from Terlingua, who has had strange encounters with the lights and Men in Black. She then begins the drive to Terlignua to find what her father found and perhaps what happened to him. Along the way she is menaced by a man in black.  The rest of the time she is listening to the tapes. The film shows the interviews as she listens to them, but when Mario describes an unusual event, the film relies upon still images to suggest something uncanny happening, which does not seem nearly as effective.

At heart this is a journey film that follows Alex across Texas, but the journey is also a journey through her own grief and regret. She left years ago for New York and now has no chance to reconnect with him, and the trip becomes a quest for closure. Strange things happen on the way, but nothing enough to elevate the film beyond its simple story.  There is a genuine love for Texas’s wide spaces in this film, but that is not enough to carry the narrative, and The Ghost Lights works its way to a rather obvious conclusion.

Director Timothy Stevens’ first feature-length film reportedly took ten days to film during the height of the covid pandemic and the producers crowdfunded the postproduction (not that there is anything wrong with that). The Ghost Lights thus feels like a low budget film, very DIY. In and of itself, that is not a problem – there are many truly great moving, scary, smart, well-made low budget films, but they make their homemade earnestness a virtue.  This film seems to get lost on Alex’s trip to find her father in the Texas desert to hint at things far bigger than it can actually deliver on.

4 out of 10