Movie Review: LUMINA

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: July 12th, 2024 / 01:00 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Rupert Lazarus, Sidney Nicole Rogers, Andrea Tivadar, Ken Lawson, Eleanor Williams, Emily Hall, Eric Roberts
Writer: Gino McKoy
Director: Gino McKoy
Distributor: Goldove
Release Date: July 12, 2024

LUMINA has a cool premise. What if your life partner turned out to be a frequent alien abductee? And where on Earth would you go to search for that person if they were taken again during your relationship?

The opening seems promising. A vehicle drives past a helmeted skull in the desert. Spaceships are hovering in the air. A reptile that looks like a tiny dinosaur investigates a dropped cell phone before the vehicle’s helmeted driver gets up and retrieves the device. The playback on it reveals a woman screaming.

So, either we’re on an alien planet or Earth has been hit by a cataclysm. Either way, how do we get here? We’ll bite.

We then cut to “six months earlier.”

We are introduced to Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers), a young woman who is vaping and listening to music in her bedroom.

Patricia then goes to visit her friends Alex (Rupert Lazarus) and Tatiana (Eleanor Williams), but stops and eavesdrops out of sight when she hears them in the middle of a lovers’ quarrel. It seems that Tatiana doesn’t want “her” to come, because “she” is in love with Alex. Alex insists that they’re just friends and he loves only Tatiana.

It turns out that the subject of discussion is not Patricia, but rather Tatiana’s fellow Londoner Delilah (Andrea Tivadar), who has also come to visit the couple in Los Angeles.

Tatiana is right to be concerned. Delilah wastes no time in telling Patricia that she wishes Tatiana would disappear. Patricia records the conversation, apparently planning to do some kind of vlog with it.

Let us pause here for a moment. First of all, LUMINA devotes a fair amount of its first act to this unengaging soap opera plotting, without managing to emphasize its most important aspect, which is the relationship between Alex and Tatiana.

Not quite so urgent but still noticeable are questions about Patricia, including why she’s recording the conversation with Delilah in the first place. Blackmail seems out of the question, since Delilah knows the recording is being made. Under what possible circumstances would Patricia make this public? Moreover, why does Patricia move in with Alex and Tatiana? Didn’t she have her own life before? What was it?

That LUMINA is uninterested in any of this is indicative of other problems. One night, there is an electrical malfunction throughout the neighborhood. Water rises into the air, and Tatiana vanishes out of the swimming pool in a shaft of light.

Patricia is the first to utter the notion of alien abduction. However, when (after a long period of immobile grieving) Alex reaches out to his UFO buff friend George (Ken Lawson), Patricia thinks this may be too much.

As George asserts that there are patterns as to where alien abductees are taken from and returned to, Alex looks to him for guidance. Ultimately, Alex, George, Patricia, and Delilah set off on a quest to try to find Tatiana.

If this feels like we’re a long way into LUMINA before the plot finds traction, that’s because we are. If writer/director Gino McKoy wants to take time establishing the characters before sending them on their adventure, fair enough.

However, despite all the time spent with the characters, we learn practically nothing about them, except that Delilah is colossally insensitive in her pursuit of Alex, Alex is remarkably slow on the uptake when it comes to Delilah, and both Tatiana and Patricia (who isn’t even involved with the guy) seem to have not much life outside of Alex.

The action eventually picks up, and we do get to suitably scary-looking aliens. By this point, though, it’s hard to stay invested. There are promising ideas in LUMINA, but they are not well-served by the uneven execution.

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