Guy Plot: A lonely security guard is manipulated by a femme fatale working for a gang of jewel thievesThis is a film that is so bleak that it actually becomes very funny, in a slightly hysterical sort of way. It was recently broadcast in the UK at 2am, which must have made for a surreal viewing experience. The plot is minimal, the characterisation light, and the script short. Much of the film is taken up with long silences (in which the characters smoke), songs being played in full, and lengthy shots (check out the one of a card game in the gangster's den, where the femme fatale vacuums the carpet). The protagonist never actually does anything, preferring to simply let events wash over him, and for a thriller there are no thrills. Nor is there any action, or humour, or human warmth (the final shot excepted). Nonetheless, the film is gripping in a curious way, its bleakness and underdog hero proving strangely compulsive viewing.

Harmon Kardon Positives first. The distinctive art direction, production design and lighting is of some interest and gives the film the film of something older.The story is obvious, the characters are undeveloped and difficult to believe and overall the film had nothing to say and no entertainment to offer. Scenes frequently finish with deadpan stares which quickly becomes tedious. The director also seems to think that chain-smoking characters will somehow add some interest and style to his film.I waited patiently thinking that perhaps there was some twist coming (like the security guard had actually planned the whole thing). Whilst this would not have been that interesting it would have been better than the whole thing plodding along inevitably.I could go on, but really I can't be bothered. It's not worth it.

Roland E. Zwick Clocking in at a pithy one-hour-and-fourteen minutes, "Lights in the Dusk" is an existentialist Finnish comedy in which a mild-mannered night watchman, who seems to be living in a world of his own, becomes an unwitting patsy in a jewelry-store robbery when he opens up to a woman who has seemingly taken a romantic interest in him.As the much put-upon working man who allows a femme fatale to trick him into doing her dirty work for her, Janne Hyytiaien gives a marvelously deadpanned performance that perfectly reflects the spare, archly humorous world director Aki Kaurismaki has created for the film. With a tone of cool detachment, the script rarely lets us into the mind of this strangely uncommunicative and inscrutable young man, whose emotions and thoughts are always buried somewhere deep beneath an expressionless surface. Yet, somehow, despite his reticence, he still manages to pique our interest and engage our sympathy, primarily because his predicament and his lack of a conventional reaction to it are both so comically unsettling. We find ourselves identifying and rooting for him even though we don't really get to know all that much about him. In a way, he reminds us a bit of Meursault from Camus' "The Stranger," a man so emotionally detached from the world around him that his actions aren't always explicable to those of us who are residing in the "real world" watching him perform them.Though it is a difficult film to pigeonhole, "Lights in the Dusk" is a modest, unassuming work that touches both the heart and the funny bone in roughly equal measure.

mykxxxxxxx This film is an excellent comment on the downward spiral of an individual resulting from a very unequal society with a faulty / oblivious criminal justice system that punishes the innocent, band-aids the symptoms of social ills, but does not address root causes, and the long term social effects of imprisonment. The little guy's life is ruined while the real criminals get away with anything - just like in the real world! Hard work gets you nowhere! Neither does loyalty! It presents in a wonderfully bittersweet way the existential angst of a life at the bottom, just scraping by, against the coldness and apathy of a kind of extreme-Darwinian world where life is brutish and short. Ultimately, a tiny crack of light opens at the end, through humans simply caring for each other. But, like in the real world, you might die before anything good happens. A very stylized film, filmed almost like a comic book, impeccably detailed, spare, and melancholy but beautiful.