User reviews

I had high hopes for this movie because it has overwhelmingly positive reviews, some even called it the "best film of 2012". I didn't watch the movie until now, and I am really disappointed!

I was dragging myself through most parts of the movie. 30 minutes into the movie and I was thinking, "I'm not interested, what's so interesting about this movie?" Things only became slightly interesting midway through the movie, and so I tried to finish the movie to see if there's a really great ending or something. But sorry, no.

I guess there are two things you can learn after watching this movie: first, the gay hook-up culture (and how it hasn't changed 20 years later... cough... Grindr... cough...); second, the overused "drugs ruin relationships" cliché. Come to think of it, I don't really see the point of the use of drugs in this movie. What's most frustrating is that not much is known about Paul other than his drug addiction! Let's draw an easy comparison: "Weekend" (2011). I don't get how "Weekend" was dragged for filth for featuring drug use, when it actually carries weight and adds an excellent level of depth to the characters! Yes, Paul is a druggie, so what then?

Go see this movie if you want to see a rocky relationship that may or may not work out in the end (no spoiler duh). But don't get you hopes up cause you'll be just as disappointed as I am.

A KVIFF screening of this year's Teddy winner in Berlin International Film Festival, from American director Ira Sachs. It is a detailed dissection of the a tug-of-war gay relationship between Erik and Paul, which soldiers on almost a decade in the present-time (1997-2006).

Thure Lindhardt, the Danish out-of-the-closet actor who has shown the immense stretch in the skin-head gay-romance BROTHERHOOD (2009, an 8/10), transforms himself into a young immigrant documentary director Erik living in NYC, probably sex-addictive, met the dandy boy Peter (Zachary Booth), first time for sexual intercourse, then the mutual attraction brings both into a relationship complex, which encompasses an overt hindrance, Paul's drug-addition, a cliché default even makes for the consistent trappings of gay life, thanks to the barren soil of the genre.

It's hard not to compare this film with last year's indie darling WEEKEND (2011, an 8/10), both stand out among other numerous lesser achievers, but in very disparate ways. KEEP THE LIGHTS ON is a sultry relationship conundrum exhausts one's vigor even dignity to sustain the suffocating love; while WEEKEND concentrates on the bad-timing symptom after a casual sex date which one must cut off his feeling and affection. Different terms, same payoff. Nevertheless, both films have a cracking two-hander cast, in this case, Lindhardt and Booth are fervently suited to their tailor-made roles, especially Lindhardt, literally carries the film on his shoulders to elaborate a not-so-extraordinary script, I do hope he will not be stereotyped into the gay-actor-can-never-act-straight category for his future career.

The film at large is a mean-well, sincere work with some uneasy aftertaste, but never accomplishes itself as a boredom, a welcome 7 out of 10 is my indulgence.

My biggest beef with this movie was that the romance between the two main characters, Erik and Paul, seemed shallow. They only meet each other a couple times before we as an audience are supposed to believe that they are "in love." Even Erik can't seem to really put into words why he's so into Paul when directly questioned. That, and that alone, made it difficult for me to be emotionally invested in the relationship between Erik and Paul, and therefore I didn't really care about any of the subsequent ups and downs that they went through. What the script lacks is the development of the relationship, and without it I am left confused as to why Erik chooses to stay with Paul throughout the story.

Otherwise, the acting was believable and the plot was interesting. I just like to feel emotionally connected to the love story in any romance movie, and I didn't feel it here.

The approach, manner of depiction, and pace are more characteristic to a Danish or Swedish movie rather than a US one. The gay topic is atypical to a US movie industry as well, although a few of them were even awarded Oscars (e.g. Brokeback Mountain); still, gay erotica there was rather superficial. Keep the Lights On shows - apart from deep and painful dramatic moments - carnal part of love and affection as well (probably too much for certain viewers, on the other hand, the director/screenwriter is gay). The other main topic - drug addiction - has been approached more frequently. However, the plot is uneven, at times the tension disappears and some moves are not grounded, the last 20 minutes or so is protracted, and the ending is trivial. But the cast is evenly strong, the best performance is carried out by a relatively unknown Dane Thure Lindhardt (as Erik Rothman); he is worth remembering, he has recently had several big roles in good productions. But all other characters are deliberated and performed giftedly as well.

If you like dramatic movies with passion and addictions, then the one in question is definitely for you.

This film tells the turbulent love story of a filmmaker and a drug addict.

The storyline looks great on paper, but "Keep the Lights On" dos not manage to captivate our engage. The two leading characters are poorly developed, especially the drug addict as we don't see who they really are. We seldom see them outside their relationship, so their portrayal is so narrow and one dimensional. As a result, I don't find myself caring for them. Their dysfunctional interaction only annoys me. And there are too many unlikely plot details, I just don't understand how Erik could be allowed in the room while the boyfriend and another guy is having sex.

"Keep the Lights On" is well made, with great sets, lighting and scene composition. However the story is not engaging and I couldn't wait for it to end.

I wanted to like this one for some obscure reason. The subject matter seemed promising and I dove into it with an open mind. Even though the acting was adequate (although nothing great), the one flaw was of course the story or rather the lack of it.

At first, I was lulled into a false sense of hope that something would come to grab my attention so I kept on watching and soon found out that this was as good as it would get. The story should always be the number one priority when producing a movie and sadly, this is not the case here.

The drug aspect didn't bother me as much as it just seemed like yet another cliched way of depicting a love story between 2 men. True, drug addiction can be a part of that community but in this case, it just felt stitched together to give the characters something to do.

The whole time I felt like the director/writer didn't know what to do with his characters to make them interesting. The chemistry between the 2 leads was fair and the supporting actors were also decent but yet again, the story didn't have enough meat to make this riveting. It dragged along to its wobbly conclusion which felt like a letdown because the payoff never came.

The only actor who I felt really owned his part was Thure Lindhardt as Erik and he was quite good in portraying the anguish and sadness of his character but he wasn't given enough substance in terms of his tale to make me feel satisfied with this movie so I could only give it a decent 4 star rating. Nothing horrible certainly but nothing outstanding either.

As a gay man, I like to support films with gay characters and stories when I can. Oftentimes such films sacrifice writing and acting in order to titillate. This film avoided that pitfall and delivered a cohesive, relevant and tasteful product. The characters were gritty and weren't cardboard cut outs. Personally, I found it a lot more relevant than a recent art film I caught called THE MASTER. The central relationship in this film is between gay men but the film manages to touch on failing/toxic relationships in general and offers up some noteworthy and humorous ensemble performances. As difficult as it is to believe, these relationships exist in gay and straight life. It seems to me that the filmmaker decided it was important to hold up a mirror and show us reality and a real relationship gone awry instead of showing us that gays can have just as little sex and/or just as loving relationships as straight folk. We have enough sanitized and safe portrayals of gays on network TV. I found the performances to be interesting and the characters were dynamic. Each had a journey unlike the static characters in the aforementioned, lauded art film. Since this film was most certainly shot quickly and with a limited budget, I take my hat off to cast and crew. The selfishness, desperation, preoccupation, co-dependency and obsessive behavior depicted seemed right on point. I felt that the filmmakers unflinchingly and without apology depicted the good, the bad and the ugly of this relationship while tell a story about two individuals in love.

In New York City, two young men are in an intense relationship which is made all the more intense as one of them is a drug addict.

The film seems bleak in the beginning (though in a realistic way) with lonely men getting lost in fast sex and hard drugs. The story, thankfully, goes beyond this as it shows some of these same people genuinely wanting to connect with someone.

Some opportunities were missed in that there were no scenes of what goes on inside a rehabilitation clinic. This would have enhanced the story as would some exploration of the co-dependent behaviour of the non-addicted partner. Also, an overly sentimental speech at a Christmas dinner seemed to go too far.

But these are small compared to the film's good points. It is very rich in exposing the ups and downs of a loving relationship that is realistically flawed. The ending (and the twenty minutes preceding the conclusion) were very powerful emotionally. The ending doesn't quite suck the tears out but instead leaves a deeper emotion which is very genuine.

Also, the film gets credit for avoiding bad, old cliches about gay characters.

Okay, really? This movie is "homophobic" and "makes it look like all gay men smoke crack"? That it didn't seem "believable"? Huh. Maybe because I watched it not only knowing it was largely a true story, but also having read the real-life memoir of the man represented in the film by "Paul" (Bill Clegg), but I thought it did a very good job of depicting the tragedy of being in a relationship with someone fundamentally f*cked up and not being able to let them go until far too late. The acting was spot-on, particularly from Thure Lindhardt, and the portrayals were entirely believable. In no context whatsoever was it intentionally designed to depict gay men as insatiable crackheads.

As for complaints that basically go back to verisimilitude: people, it's an indie flick, and a super- low-budget one at that. You can't realistically depict Manhattan circa 1998 that way, nor can you have characters whose attire and hairstyles change all that much during the film. (That said, I've seen photos of Bill Clegg, and his super-preppy "look" -- which is how Paul is consistently depicted in the film -- hasn't really changed much over the years.) My only issue in this regard was in terms of easily avoidable problems; in the second scene for instance, set in 1998, Erik walks by what is clearly recognizable (to a New Yorker, at least) as one of the bus shelters constructed within the past five years or so. They really had to shoot on *that* street?

My problems with the film weren't with the acting, but more with its failure to fully flesh out Paul as a character. I'm unclear whether this was intentional -- in the context of "you can never *really* know someone" -- but Paul started out as an enigma and largely stayed that way. I understand that this comes with the territory with a largely autobiographical film written by the protagonist, Erik (though I have no clue whatsoever why he's Danish, to the extent of having conversations in Danish with his sister - Ira Sachs is American and Jewish, though obviously a real-life filmmaker), but hewing so closely to a real-life timeline left Sachs with too little time to delve into what compelled him to stay with "Paul" for such an extended period. I also thought there were a few too many largely extraneous side plots, particularly involving Erik's BFF's biological-clock issues and the weird muscley guy Erik inexplicably hooked up with two times five years apart. And why did a solitary, unexplained pair of scenes have him going to Virginia for an extended period of time? (neither of which had anything whatsoever to do with the main plot)

Still, even given its flaws, it's one of the best gay-themed indie films I've seen in quite some time (though "Weekend" is still better all around). It avoids the most typical gay-film clichés (the coming-out stories, the happy endings, the life revolving around discos and fabulous hags) to deliver something raw and real.

Keep the lights on is a story about Erik, a filmmaker, who falls in love with Paul. The movie is about their decade long relationship with many highs and lows and how their lives, tangled into each other's, gets affected by the choices they make.

First of all, hats-off to the direction by Ira Sachs. The film is shot in a very sombre manner which states that the men were never meant to be together to begin with, without the characters explicitly saying it in the film. I am excited now to see his much spoken about "Love is Strange" if I wasn't before. Another thing which I liked is the character development of the protagonist. As he is a filmmaker, he is depicted as eccentric who follows his desire but at the same time, we see him getting entirely overwhelmed by not being able to handle his relationship. As if he is putting so much efforts to make it work but it doesn't seem to be happening like he wanted which makes him furious and forces him to say or assume something which makes the whole situation even worse. Erik is played by Thure Lindhart. I haven't seen any of his other work, but I'll sure keep a lookout from now on.

The movie occasionally takes a very slow pace which might be a turn off to some people but I'll recommend one and all to stay fixated as all the other times, the movie is truly heartbreaking. The truthfulness of the characters, the amber cinematography, the contemporary demeanours but still yearning for traditional facets of a relationship like having a child, are the things which triumph for Keep the Lights on. It's the absence of emotional transparency between the couple which makes it one of the most moving films of its time.

Do give it a go if you're a fan of watching budding romantic flings on-screen and are not too afraid of watching it all shatter as well in less than an hour and a half.

NOTE: If you like, "Keep the Lights On", you might also like, "Happy Together" by Kar-Wai Wong.

I saw this with a group of other filmmakers. The film was loosely constructed and most of us found it tedious and boring. One person left mid film and I can say I can't blame him.

The scenes seemed to be edited in a haphazard manner,and the story moved so slow that at times it appeared that there was no story at all. We failed to connect to the characters and were not invested at all. I found myself wanting the main character to hurry up and die so I could go home.

Coming from such an esteemed director, I think we all were expecting a deeper, more emotionally intense cinematic experience. It was a festival hit, including Berlin, and I am not sure why.

You know what? I'm not interested in people who destroy their lives with drugs. And I'm not interested in people who destroy their lives by attaching themselves like leeches to people who are destroying their lives with drugs. That's not tragic; that's not romantic; that's stupid.

In every case - the enabler-leeches just as much as the addicts - that kind of behavior is self-indulgent, narcissistic, and completely avoidable. I don't feel sorry for them any more than I feel sorry for billionaires who whine about having to pay taxes or for 21st-century hunter-gatherers who whine if we try take away their constitutionally-mandated 1000-round-per-second assault rifles.

That's what this profoundly disappointing movie is about: whining idiots whose lives are totally devoted to stupid, avoidable, totally unnecessary, self-indulgent, destructive behavior. This movie is not about love. It's not about what it means to be a gay man. It's about stupidity.

The problem is that it proclaims to the world that we gay men are self-centered, self-indulgent, drug-crazed idiots and the self-centered, self-indulgent idiot men who "love" them. Bullsh!t. There is no love ANYWHERE in this lying, infuriating movie. The gay men who gush about how REAL this movie is must be like the ones portrayed in it. Thank God I don't know any of them.

For the information of straight readers: gay men like the ones in this movie are a tiny, TINY, insignificant, completely negligible minority who do not in any way represent the community as a whole. The percentage of gay crack addicts is no greater than the percentage of straight crack addicts, and ALL of them are just as boring as the two in this movie are. Most gay men are just like straight men, except a little smarter and with better taste in sex partners.

The four stars are for Thure Lindhardt, a beautiful man in every way, who plays gay characters better than any gay actor I can think of. I first saw him in the Danish movie Broderskab (Brotherhood), in which his excellent, subtle performance was overshadowed by electrifying Swedish actor David Dencik in the most powerful portrayal of a gay man I've ever seen.

Lindhardt doesn't have such intense acting competition in this movie, so he shines more brightly. Although his character is a boring, infuriating fool, his performance is fantastic. Lindhardt is always worth watching, and - for me - he's the only reason this movie is.

I feel like the beginning of the film was rushed so it was difficult to see how each event weighed on the lives of the character so that they may develop or become more exposed as it progresses. Almost immediately, he has sex with the guy who says he has a girlfriend, then the next time we see them they seem to be dating, having regular sex and doing drugs together. I think it wouldve added some value to see the progression of their relationship or at least a motivation behind whatever need they had possessed in order to be together despite the deterioration of their own individual lives. I was hoping that there was a reason for the escalation of the relationship but it just kept leading to the same place; mostly sex scenes and then abandonment from drug use.

The film would have improved for me had I been able to understand what was at stake by the time their relationship and lives deteriorated. I didnt finish the movie because I felt that what I was going to see wasnt going to be much different that what I had seen in the first 45 minutes.

Since this film is now 13 years old, it's safe to say that the lead actor, Thure Lindhardt, never made it big in America, if he even wanted to. That is a shame as he is very good and very charismatic in this. Actually, he's by far the primary reason for viewing it. It's about a long love relationship between two men that begins in NYC starting in 1998 and it's a sad one. Lindhardt's character falls in love with a guy named Paul, portrayed not terribly interestingly by Zachary Booth. He's not really bad, but it's a monotonous role in a somewhat monotonous relationship. To put it simply, it's about a man in love with a drug addict, Paul, and their ups and downs and Paul's ins and outs of rehab. There is nothing wrong with Lindhardt's performance, but there are some things wrong with the writing and the direction. It's not a bad film, but it's just nothing exceptional other than the lead performance, though Julianne Nicholson also does well as a lifelong friend of Eric. Given all that we witness, it should be a moving or touching film and it rarely is, but when it is, it all comes from Lindhardt.

Honestly this movie was one of the worst gay movies I've ever seen.

The audience was fidgeting for the whole length, I saw a few people go out in the middle of the movie and not come back. I personally stayed the whole time and I couldn't believe the abyssal emptiness of it.

2 main problems:

1/ The movie is supposed to cover 8 years (from 1998 to 2006) but everyone is wearing 2012 clothes and 2012 haircuts. Not just the people on the street - all the actors too. And in 8 years, they don't change clothes or haircuts or anything not even once. The guy starts and ends with the exact same shaggy beard. I know they probably shot the movie under 2 weeks but it would be nice if they made an effort to at least pretend they didn't. I'm not saying that just to be anal about it - but because it's one of the main things that kill the movie because even with the title cards warning you we've changed years their whole story seems to last 1 month, certainly not 8 years. Difficult to get emotionally involved.

2/ The drug. I didn't know it was a drug movie, but it is. It's closer to Trainspotting than to a gay romance. And I hated the casual way it's shown, as if all gay men smoked crack and it was normal. I've been around, and I've never seen ANYBODY smoke crack, ever. Not saying it doesn't exist but to play it like it's a normal occurrence is just stupid.

Then there are many other things: A guy who's in the closet, with a girlfriend... and 1 month later he's kissing his boyfriend in the street? And of course we saw nothing that showed his evolution. The problem just disappeared. There were definite pacing problems as well (the first 25 minutes, everything is happy-in-wonderland, and you're just shifting on your seat waiting for the movie to start).

The only saving point is that the actor playing the drug addict is incredibly good looking. Apart from that, you'd tell me the movie was sponsored by the American Family Association and the FRC, I wouldn't be surprised. it just plays into every single negative stereotype about gay people (save for the child molesting, I guess they didn't have the time).

Ira Sachs's "Keep the Lights On" focuses on dismal relationship between two men in New York. A previous reviewer praised the movie for not taking a cliched view of gay relationships and showing that gays can have damaged relationships just as much as heterosexuals can.

Maybe so, but the movie drags a lot. Plenty of movies - namely 2005's "Junebug" - have deliberately moved slowly to tell the story, but I don't really see the purpose here. It's got a good story, but they could've presented it better.

Thure Lindhardt should give up acting. His performance lacks credibility. This movie has very little going for it. The intimate scenes are well done however.